All,
The summer holidays are now long forgotten by most of us and its time to enjoy the autumn, and specifically our Q3 issue of the magazine. This issue is coming to you a bit later than normal, we are still experiencing the covid consequences and the effect it has on articles and deadlines, but finally we are ready to issue.
There is specifically one of the articles I would like to touch upon a little bit more, our fist article. This article will give you a bit of insight to our latest SFPE engineering guide “International Handbook of Structural Fire Engineering” due now in October. The field of structural fire engineering is advancing rapidly, and the industry needs good quality technical guidance. This handbook shows that SFPE is at the forefront when it comes to the development of technical documents, whether it is guidelines, standards, etc.
I firmly believe that one of the main mission tools for SFPE is our committees; their freedom to develop and operate under very limited supervision (the working groups are led by and consists of industry experts) is what is the key to the high-quality documents that we produce. The procedure itself (draft documents, external review, period for comments, etc.) ensures excellence of our SFPE documents, and that is why there are so highly valued by engineers and by the industry.
We have just celebrated the first SFPE in-person event in a long time, the Annual Conference. The attendee’s number were great, this has of course to do with a very strong program but also the desire for people to meet again and be able to network in a more “normal” way (there are covid measures in place). Virtual conferences are a great tool to reach people and deliver knowledge, but it cannot (yet) give that little extra of having a good discussion during a conference coffee break or over a beer at the bar in the evening. Unfortunately, borders were still closed for most non-US citizens, but that didn’t stop this from being a great conference. There conference was a real success and good finish of the year for SFPE.
Back to the articles, as always there is a wide spread of topics, please have a look and read the ones that you believe will be useful or just interesting to you.
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 December.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor