All,
I assume everyone is either looking forward to their vacation or enjoying it. Either way, our second issue is here and another opportunity for us to share knowledge and information with you all.
I have already mentioned that you will notice a strong focus on Emerging technologies and on Sustainability in our articles this year. This is to some degree an objective from our side, but I would say it is also what a large part of fire safety articles are focused on lately, and it is also something the industry needs. Practitioners need to stay up to date with the ongoing development, it is necessary to stay competent to be able to develop fire safe solutions. Competence within our profession is something that we must continue to focus on, especially in areas where it is difficult to find high quality information, which is exactly the problem for the areas mentioned earlier.
WUI, li-ion, timber, CLT, BESS, etc. are all acronyms and words that we are expected to know and understand. That is however not the case, in general we need a much higher level of understanding, and I am not referring to individual knowledge regarding fire engineering solutions, the industry as a whole is lacking knowledge about these subjects. This must be looked upon holistically, there is a need for a much wider approach (political, research, education, design, engineering, products, legislation, testing, and so on), unless we look upon this with other eyes we will always be struggling to keep up. I am not saying that we as fire engineers should take this responsibility on our shoulders and solve the world problems, but we should at least understand that we (as in all of us) need to change our mindset on this one.
I would also like to mention that SFPE has several upcoming Webinars (our Sustainability series), Symposiums (our next one being the one Mass Timber Structures) and of course our Annual Conference in Octobre (I have seen the abstracts and I can assure you that you will be enjoying high quality presentations).
Enjoy and learn from the articles in this issue, I certainly did.
If there are readers out there that feel that you have an important subject that you would like to share with the industry do not hesitate to contact us, we can make that happen.
As always, a great thanks to the people who have put in a lot of time and effort to make this issue a reality.
The next issue will come in September.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor