Hello. My name is Chris Jelenewicz. I am the engineering program manager with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, also known as SFPE. I'm also a licensed fire protection engineer. And in this segment, we're gonna discuss the History of Fire Protection Engineering, and specifically, we're gonna talk about how the profession of fire protection engineering has evolved. It evolved from Ancient times, when some city planners kinda thought about, what are some commonsense things we could use or do to prevent a city, an entire city, from burning down to where we are today, where we are using very sophisticated computer fire models and very sophisticated technologies to alert people about fire and control fires. So, before we even had fire protection engineers, actually fire protection engineering was actually practiced by city planners and people who run the government. Basically, the first issue with fire was that we were burning down entire cities. So for example, the city of Rome back in 64 AD had a fire that completely destroyed the entire city, just about. There's an old folklore that the Emperor Nero sat there and played the fiddle while the city burned. That's where we came up with the idea or the concept of fiddling while Rome burns. There was also a huge fire in 1666 in the city of London, and probably one of the most popular fires or most notable fires came in 1871, which we see in the picture behind me, that's a picture of the city of Chicago, or the great Chicago Fire, and the idea that Mrs. O'Leary's cow started a fire that destroyed a whole entire city. Well, after these cities burned, city planners thought, well, what can we do so that never happens again? Well, they thought of ideas like, well, instead of building our structures out of wood, let's build them out of non-combustible materials. Also, we were noticing that when there was a fire, the fire in one building would cross an entire street and expose another building to fire. So, the city planners thought about widening the streets. They also said, we need water to extinguish a fire. How do we get water into the hands of the people who are fighting these fires quicker? So this lasted up into the late 1800s, early 1900s. We kinda got a good feeling. Hey, when we have a fire now, we're not burning down the whole city. However, we are seeing that entire buildings are burning down. In the late 1800s going into the 1900s, in New England and other places in the East Coast, some giant factories were burning to the ground. The picture here is the Crystal Palace, which burnt down in 1858. That was in Manhattan or New York City, at the location where Bryant Park is right now. And when they built the Crystal Palace, the designer said, hey, we're gonna design a fireproof building. We're gonna build a building out of steel, or concrete, or pproducts that do not burn. And as a result, these buildings will not burn to the ground. Unfortunately, their logic was a little flawed. The one thing they didn't think about was, even though the building is non-combustible, the things inside your building are combustible. These things will burn, and they will be responsible for spreading fire throughout a building, so bad that it will burn down an entire building. So, what did we do? First, the Fire Protection Community said, hey, let's put up these things called fire walls. These are walls that we put in the building, and then when a fire starts, the fire will not spread from one side of the building to the other. So, we are using the idea of compartmentation. Compartmentalizing the building, so when there is a fire, it will remain in that part of the building. Therefore, the entire building will not burn down. Additionally, we saw the first automatic fire sprinkler systems. The idea of putting pipes through a building, attaching nozzles in them that spray water onto a fire when there is a fire. These systems would eventually control a fire and then extinguish the fire. So, we got pretty good about protecting buildings from burning to the ground. And then what we saw throughout the 1900s is a series of catastrophic fires. We're talking about fires where many people died, sometimes in the hundreds. The first fire to talk about occurred in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaste factory. In this fire, 146 people died. Most of them were young, teenage, girls who were forced to work in a sweatshop. In 1911, sweatshops were very common. They had very poor working conditions. People were asked to work long hours almost everyday and they were death traps. When the fire occurred at the Triangle Shirtwaste factory, there were three exits where people to exit the building if there were a fire. One of the exits was locked. Now, in 1911, it wasn't uncommon that we locked the exit towards in these sweatshops because the owners did not want to go people on brink. They were concerned about people leaving the job early, so we locked them inside the building. Imagine that. The second exit was a stairway. The door of that stairway swung against the direction of exit travel. So, when people tried to enter that stairway the door kept getting in their way. And it slowed the time for people to exit the building. If you ever see an exit stairwell today, you will see that the door swings into the stairwell, going the same direction that we travel so the door will not block people that are trying to egress. The third exit was a verily poorly designed fire escape. Not too many people were able to exit. When this fire occurred, it sent a message to the whole fire safety community that we have to do a better job, and sent a whole message to our government policy makers saying, that these sweatshops are death traps, and we need to fix them. So, the one thing we did is we designed our codes appropriately. We said that no longer can you lock exit doors. If we have an exit stair, the door going into that stair should swing in the direction of exit travel, so that when people are in a fire, they can get out safely. Unfortunately, a fire in 1946 at Atlanta's Hotel Winecoff. Left 119 people dead. And, once again, it was our younger population. Atlanta, being the capital of Georgia, on the night of the fire, that day, they were holding a mock Congress or a mock legislature where they invited high school kids from every legislative district in Georgia to come and pretend like they were part of the lawmaking process in Georgia. Well, most of those students were staying at the Hotel Winecoff that night. What happened there was a fire started in the lower part of the building. And in this building was one large open staircase, the only way to get out of the building. The fire started at the bottom of the stair. The hot fire and gasses extended through the stair like a chimney. As a result, the poor kids that were on the upper floors had no way to exit the building. They either had to die inside that building and die in the fire or jump out the window to their deaths, like this poor person here. The interesting thing about this photo, it was taken by an amateur photographer. The next day, that photo was on every newspaper in the world, almost. This is the first time that the amateur photographer has received a Pulitzer Prize for photography. As a result of this fire, the fire protection community got together and said, hey, we have to do something about exit stairs and make sure we don't have fires that extend from the bottom of the building all the way up to the top. We have to make sure that there's more than one way to get out of the building when there's a fire. Another fire occurred in 1958 at Our Lady of Angels school which was a grade school in Chicago. An interesting point about this fire. Was that. The principal had a rule. She said, if there's a fire in the building, we have to get the principal's permission before we activate the fire alarm. Well, when the fire happened that day, 92 people died. Most of them young kids, and they all died. One main reason they died is they didn't get adequate notification to tell them that there was a problem in the building. Additionally, there was a delay in notifying the fire department. As a result of this fire, the fire protection community got together and said, hey, when there's a fire, we have to make sure we get the information to people out as soon as possible. We also have to get quick notification to the fire department. Because the quicker the fire department comes, the better chances are people will survive. In 1977, there was also a fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. The Beverly Hills Supper Club was not in Beverly Hills, California but in Kentucky, in a suburb right out Cincinnati. When they built the Beverly Hills Supper Club, this was one of the ritziest, glamorous nightclubs in the whole United States. The best people came to this nightclub. On a night in 1977, John Davidson was performing. Unfortunately, that night. A 165 people died. The main reason they died was a fire burn out of control away from the main audience. The people did not know a fire was occurring in the building. By the time they knew it was time to exit, it was too late. Some people died in the exact chairs they were sitting in. When they interviewed the survivors, they said, hey, what happened in there? How did you get out alive? A lot of people said, hey, the building staff really helped us out. It was the building staff that ran through the hallways and ran into the club and said, there's a fire. It was the building staff that showed people how to get out of the building. And that's where we come from the idea of emergency planning, and making sure we train building staff appropriately. Because we see, when people enter buildings, especially public buildings or buildings they're unfamiliar with, they don't really take a lot of action when there is an emergency. They rely on the staff. Also, the people said, hey, we were in such a glitzy, great night nightclub, we never thought that something like this could even occur. But unfortunately, 165 people died that day. Another interesting fire occurred in 1980 at the MGM Grand Hotel, right on the Las Vegas strip. 84 people died that day. The fire started in the casino right here. The interesting thing about this fire was that the codes at the time in Las Vegas, if you had a fire suppression system, like a sprinkler system, you were not required to protect the areas that are not occupied, sorry. If an area was occupied for more than 24 hours or for 24 hours, you did not have to have protection in that part of the building. And the casino, they said that's gonna be occupied 24 hours. There was an adjacent deli. That part of the building also would be occupied 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, they changed that plan. A fire started in the deli, quickly spread to the casino. Most of this casino is on fire. The adjacent hotel right here, none of the fires spread to the hotel. However, the smoke and toxic gases did, and this is where most of the people die. The smoke and the toxic gases travel through shaft-ways, expansion joints. As we can see here. A lot of people were forced to the balconies where that was their only hope. The area of refuge on the balcony and hope that either the fire would be extinguished or the fire fighter's would come to rescue them. The World Trade Center, I think everybody knows what happened on that day on September 11th. Now, the one thing you might not know is that the fire protection community worked hard to investigate this incident and find out what happened. This is probably the largest investigation in the history of the world. I'm sure over a 100 fire protection engineers looked at everything from. Why did the structure fail? How did the fire spread through the building? What about the fire suppression systems or the fire systems that where the building at the time of the fire? They also talked to the survivors. They asked them, hey, what were you doing when you notice something was wrong? What made you decide to get out, to leave the building? How did you leave? They took all this information and developed ways to make sure that today, taller buildings are safer, because of the investigation that occurred after this incident. And today, I would say we are in the era of what we call Performance-Based Fire Protection. Over the last 100 years, fire protection was basically revolved around the codes and the standards. The codes say you do this for this type of occupancy. If you're designing a hotel, you need to do that. If you're designing a school, you need to do A, B, C, and D. However, with modern technologies, buildings are becoming much larger. They're having unusual shapes. They are becoming much taller. Like you see right here in the Venetian Hotel. We're taking buildings, and we're making the inside look like the outside. And because of this, a lot of these building designs are not fitting within our own prescriptive codes. So what we're seeing in the future is that fire protection engineers, instead of looking at a codebook and deciding how we provide fire protection. We're really taking all the great tools we have today, advanced computer modeling, advanced technologies, and notification suppression. And we're putting them into the building based on the performance, based on fire safety goals, where we always say our number one goal is to make sure that everybody will get out alive. And finally, any discussion about fire protection or fire protection engineering should resolve around Dr John L Bryan. Dr Bryan started the Fire Protection Engineering program here at the University of Maryland. He was the Chair of the department, and there's a scholarship named after his wife, the Sarah Bryan Scholarship. If it wasn't for people like John Bryan, we wouldn't all be here today. So, there are some thing about fire protection engineering has evolved. We started with protecting entire cities from burning down to the ground. Once we got a good idea of making sure that cities weren't burning, we looked at protecting individual buildings. Once we figured that problem out, we looked at catastrophes or catastrophic fires and said, how do we adopt those codes so these types of incidents never happen again? We are now at the point where you're using advanced engineering tools. And finally, our designs are becoming more performance-based based on fire safety codes that will ensure that people, property, and the environment are protected from fire.
