159 - The WUI Problem with Michele Steinberg and Birgitte Messerschmidt

Both are from NFPA , that's Birgitta Messerschmidt and Michelle Steinberg , and they're both passionately dealing with a wee problem . You can read their columns in the NFPA journal . You can listen to them at NFPA podcast sometimes .

Anyway , I brought them here to the Fire Science Show because I hope that together we will be able to put a holistic bird's eye view on the issue of the wee problem , wild and urban interface , and I had a lot of scientific talks about the WE in the podcast so far .

So we've talked about how the forest burns , what are the variables that influence that fire , but we've not discussed that much on the community or the building or the fire protection side , on how those communities can be prepared and buildings protected , and here we're not talking particular solutions but more like an ecosystem aspect of it .

What makes people do safe homes , why they do not invest in that , how to build the regulations to allow for that . What are we lacking in terms of the testing regime and , yeah , as I said in the very first sentence , what the Wii problem actually really is . So a bunch of really good questions and even more great answers in this episode .

And this episode also serves to convince you , my fellow FICEFT engineers , to convince you that there's future in we for all of us . And if you don't like it , that's fine , but I truly believe the future will arrive , no matter our feelings , and I think we should all get educated on we .

It's a difficult subject , complicated subject , so I really hope resources like podcasts and interviews like this one can bring you up at speed to the best knowledge you can have on this issue , which will be highly , highly relevant in the future . Anyway , I think that's it for introducing you to the subject . I guess you need to hear it from Michel and Birgitta .

So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode . Michelle and Birgitta , so let's spin the intro and jump into the episode . Welcome to the Firesize Show . My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host . This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants . Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy .

Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise , with colleagues working across the world to help protect people , property and environment .

Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants , the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years , with offices across the country in seven locations , from Edinburgh to Bath , and now employing more than 100 professionals .

Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society , applying the best research experience and diligence for effective , tailored fire safety solutions . In 2024 , ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals .

Who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures this year , get in touch at OFRconsultantscom . Hello everybody , welcome to the Fire Science Show . I am here today joined by Birgit Messerschmidt . Hello Birgit , welcome back to the show .

People came in thinking they knew what it was and walked out thinking I don't know what it was and walked out thinking I don't know what it is .

The point is , what we're trying to describe is a problem of homes igniting during wildfires and in fact not just a building but multiple buildings , whole communities , and we're trying to describe it in a way that defies kind of the scientific logic of it , if that makes any sense . So we're trying to draw a line .

When you say interface that you assume there's sort of a line or a barrier or boundary . That is a nice neat definition for a very messy problem . The messiness comes when we're talking about what is causing the fire . So that wild land word gets in there .

You can argue and I live in the Northeast of the US where many friends have told me we do not have wild land in this region which I'd argue yes , you do , but they see this . What is even wild land . We don't understand what that means , first of all .

And then urban also has its own connotations of a city and people think well , cities don't burn down from wildfires . So what are you talking about ?

What I guess we're trying to get at is the exterior exposure from vegetative fuels to buildings , and typically what we find in the US is the residential buildings are the ones that primarily are the ones that are at risk , primarily the ones that burn . It doesn't mean that our commercial buildings are so well built .

It just means there's a lot more houses than there are anything else and they've built in ways that make them very , very vulnerable to the exterior exposure from a wildfire . Even the word wildfire has its own set of definitions .

But the presentation and why people get so confused is when we go beyond the sort of the why are things burning , how are things burning , which is our sort of scientific question .

We get into politics , which is oh , if I'm defined , if my home or my community is defined as being in the wild and urban interface or in the WUI , then I either have to meet some kind of standard or I'm going to get higher insurance rates because I'm seen as higher risk or something bad is going to happen to me , as opposed to somebody who's not there

thinking well , I have no risk from this problem because I'm not in the WUI . And we find over and over again that those definitions don't make sense in real life .

And now , ironically , because our government is putting a lot more money into trying to protect homes and communities at risk , now people want to be in the WUI so they can get grants and they can get help , etc . Etc . So it's really ironic that we have people running away from and towards this definition .

That in and of itself is not very helpful to describe what the problem is .

You take a sharpie and draw a line five kilometers or five miles further , and on the left it's we , on the right it's not , because in many cases , like in your column , you wrote about the fire , the top spire , where it arguably destroyed 1,400 homes that were not even in a vegetated area right .

So it's more like where the fire began and what it can danger . Is that the correct way ? I mean , if you put it like that , it becomes a metaphorical problem , like what it is .

You know you draw the line and you know you could use some 3D modeling to communicate that better . But you more or less understand where you're going to have inundation .

It's so much harder to deal with fire on this level of understanding how it's going to impact structures and where the actual risk of ignition is , because you have wind , because you have fuels that you move from .

Let's say you've got a wildfire coming through vegetation , you get embers into the mulch next to your house or the shrub or the flatbed of a pickup truck that's parked next to a house and these all become fuel for the fire that is ultimately going to take the community down and you think , well , that's not a wildfire anymore , because if it's in the mulch and

it's on the deck or it's in the pickup truck , those aren't wild lands , those are objects , common objects , around our homes and our yards . Or it's in the pickup truck , those aren't wild lands , those are objects , common objects around our homes and our yards .

So it's super confusing to try to draw this line and the way we've tried to explain this to property owners , and that's the thing I think I'm looking forward to talking more about sort of the fire protection engineering role here , because we're trying to tell people who are already built in a highly hazardous situation with materials that aren't going to withstand

this fire , we're trying to tell them , who are already built in a highly hazardous situation with materials that aren't going to withstand this fire , we're trying to tell them to do what they can do and what we know they can do and what they can control is the fuel which starts with their house and out to the extent of their property .

That's what they have control over usually , and they can't control the wind . They can't control the national forest you know a mile down the road they can control what does my roof look like ? What does the vegetation look like right around my house ?

What are the other things that could catch embers that I can modify so that when we have this inevitable fire coming , there's things I can do to prevent my home igniting . So that's getting down to that micro level . And then , oh , by the way .

If my neighbor's closer than about 100 feet , I have to worry about them , and so we start to get people to work with their neighbors to reduce those potential fuel sources for ignition to homes .

So just telling people look at a line on a map does nothing for them , and I have innumerable cases of homes within a city limit that burn , that people freak out because they couldn't understand . Well , they're not in the WUI , so how did that happen ? The fire doesn't really care about the map .

From your perspective . Having trouble to define this WUI , does it create challenges in defining how the building should be built or what materials should be used in that ? How do you approach that problem and do you see light in the tunnel to solve it actually , or we really need to wait until they figure out the definition ?

I think actually , when I think about how ISO TT92 is addressing it , calling it large outdoor fires .

They're based on a fire starting in the corner in a room . If we go back to the good old SBI test , et cetera , and then how that we want to prevent that fire from growing big . We don't want it to then impinge on the neighboring building , et cetera , et cetera , here we have a completely different fire scenario .

We have the fire coming from the outside , as Michelle was pointing to , the embers coming in igniting things around your building and then starting fire exposure directly on the outside .

I don't think you will find any regulations around the world that has a requirement to fire spread and fire resistance on a regular suburban home if it's not considered the wildland , and that is a problem . We have to go away from only thinking of fire as starting from within and thinking of fire starting from the outside as well .

And when you think about zoning and planning in the United States , zoning started from cases where businesses would just build these highly hazardous factories and things right in the middle and just people would be living around this .

Seattle , for example , burned down because some guy was you know , everything's built out of wood and some guy is boiling glue or something , and the fire gets away and it goes everywhere and it burns the whole city down . So you have these terrible , noxious , fire-prone uses happening next to homes and next to other things that you really shouldn't have fire around .

And that's when zoning starts . It says no , we're going to zone this for residential use , and that means you can't have crazy stuff in the middle of the residential area . We're going to put the factories over here , we're going to put the farms over here .

So you're kind of drawing out like trying to have a measure of safety , but it comes from an exterior exposure to fire . That's our history . We had cities burning down for decades at the turn of the century from bad planning and zoning and also no firefighting infrastructure . And we've solved that . We've solved that with fire protection engineering .

We've solved that with zoning and planning , and now with wildfire . If you go to certain states that don't like regulation , plan is a four-letter word . Zoning is bad , but it's . Do you really want to be putting your homes next to the glue factory ? No , people see nature and they say , oh nature , it's a beautiful day .

We take a picture and that's how it is . And what they don't realize is no , nature needs fire . This is a fiery landscape . Fire is going to come to it . You need to understand what you're living next to and that's been very , very difficult because , again , glue factory , you can pretty much guarantee you're going to have a pretty high frequency of fires

. Forest has its own fire ecosystem , fire return interval , and that's way longer than most people think about . It could be a 20-year interval , it could be a 20-year interval , it could be a 50-year interval before you're going to get your natural fire .

So there's a real dissonance there and it's difficult for us to grasp it because we think , you know , we've got the postcard snapshot in our mind of this is what this place looks like , this forest , and not realizing like , oh no , this needs to burn every 15 years Like this really needs to burn to be healthy .

And yet we're going to build our wooden structures right up next to it .

That's really interesting , isn't it ? I actually never thought about it like that , Michelle , Taking the fire away from the center of communities and instead we've taken the communities and putting them into the center of the fire . So that is an interesting way of looking at it and considering this planning thought and the challenge of fire come from the outside .

I always like to make the comparison of our suburban areas , our wild and urban interface areas . Anytime we build a lot of one and two family home , I like to compare it to what we do if we were building an apartment building .

So if I was going to build 100 homes and I was going to stack them on top of each other and get a high-rise building , I would have all kinds of strict requirements to what materials these homes could be built of , how each one could exit their home and getting out safely from this high-rise building If I instead buy a big piece of land out in this beautiful

natural area and I'd place these hundred houses all out here in this beautiful area . They are now seen as a one-family home , so the requirements to fire performance of each of the homes are fairly limited . Often it's only the roofing , if even , and there are no requirements to .

Nor can we ensure that everyone can get out in case of a fire , because nobody has thought about the situation where a wildfire comes in and everybody in these hundred homes have to leave at the same time . So this beautiful little cul-de-sac with a hundred houses and one road in and out is going to turn out to be a disaster .

So we have to start thinking of this as a scenario that has to be designed for not just in what we traditionally think of wild and urban interface , but in many places around the world .

For I think it comes more from the convenience and the way how a legal system is built rather from any technical reason why it's organized like that . But I mean , even if you build buildings inside of a city , you have those requirements the fire shall not spread to neighboring structures .

So we already had some of those to some extent at least , the fire starting from the inside of the building shall not spread to the neighboring constructions . How is this threat different from that scenario ?

We're talking about a flash or a fire out of a window . We're talking about a whole building on fire . That's the difference . So you now have not just one building , but several buildings , because it's not like all the embers decide to just land on one house and ignite that house and get that burning .

We're talking about several houses that are potentially starting to burn and burn together , and then we start the configuration . Then the building starts burning , creates its new embers , it spreads to the next building , et cetera . It's not just fire from within . It's one room burning in one building , exposing the neighboring house here .

It's many buildings burning at the same time , exposing many different houses .

I did have Professor Simone in the podcast and the one thing that he told me that really stayed with me is that once the fire coming from the wildfire , once this fire reaches the first house , it changes everything because suddenly the stuff produced in the fire of that house , plus the stuff from the wildfire itself , is a completely new hazard .

How do you see that , how big issue is that and how much we should care about it ?

So I did a bag of an envelope calculation saying I'm going to build a house that's approximately 200 square meters , 2000 square feet , and do it in the traditional American way . You would have more than 30 tons of combustible materials in that building . And that was even without whatever content people put in . This was just a construction material .

It was unbelievable . So that is why , when each of these buildings starts burning , you go from a completely different fire . It's no longer a wildland fire . It becomes this wildland urban interface fire . It becomes an urban fire . It's no longer a wildland fire . It becomes this wildland urban interface fire . It becomes an urban fire .

It becomes a conflagration if it's not stopped in its track .

Dr Cohen is a retired Forest Service fire scientist who continues to preach his wisdom around his hometown of Missoula , montana , and other places , but his work and others , you know , is sort of the seminal work on home ignitions during these events and what he found , along with other scientists , in the International Crown Fire Experiments in 1998 , they went up to

the Northwest Territories of Canada , and they had these plots of , you know , these beautiful tall pine trees . They were able to light these plots on fire and watch these crown fires .

Just go , you know , you've got 50 foot trees with 100 foot flame lengths , like very dramatic , but what he was testing was these make a wall out of wood , you know , make a roof line , put a person , a dummy , a mannequin out there . Just see what happens , see what happens to the gear , see what happens to things , and put the cameras out .

This is low-tech in 1998 . Put a camera protected by something , and then you'd see so many things where the fire would get close enough to shatter the glass on the lens in the camera . Very dramatic , and so what they were showing , though , was the fire moving through that fuel , those tall trees with the magnificent , crazy flames .

You don't want to be anywhere near that because you will die right . A human being will instantly be killed by radiant heat from those flames . You don't have to have the flame touch .

The radiant heat was what they're testing , but what they saw was if you had that piece of wood wall only 30 feet , 10 meters-ish , away from the flame , the edge of the fires , it didn't ignite . You might get a little scorched , but it didn't have enough sustained radiant heat to ignite and continue to burn that wood wall .

So they said , okay , we've solved part of this problem .

If you're worried about the fire impacting the home , radiant heat isn't that big of a deal , because if you can get that siding the sides of the house , the vulnerable parts of the exterior , to be away from that , so this idea of what they like to call defensible space another arguable term but this idea of space between the flaming front of the fire and the

wall , okay , then you've eliminated the radiant heat problem from that source of fire , which is really great . So this was very exciting . What , of course , we're talking about , with a lot of the impacts to home , though , is not the fire coming and blowing up the home and all this mythology we have . It's not the radiant heat .

In most cases it's the embers or it's the small flames that are running through uninterrupted vegetation to the house or to a fence or to a deck .

I mean we joke that you can design the perfect house and then the unlicensed contractors meaning everybody who wants to do it themselves don't get a permit and they go out to Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever and buy the stuff and tack a nice big flammable wooden deck to the house , big flammable wooden deck to the house .

So it is that pathway of the fire spread are again things that now scientists are looking at much more carefully , because we've already solved for the radiant heat , we already get it . Okay , we don't want big flames near our house Cool , we can usually accommodate that .

But we also can't have any flame touching the house and that's where you get fire creeping through the grass , fire igniting a wooden fence and carrying it like a wick or a fuse right up to the house . So it's these appurtenant structures , it's these things that don't even catch our attention when building and designing residential structures to think about .

But it's the first thing and it's interesting . There have been now work on flammability of fence materials and arrangements and so forth , mobility of fence materials and arrangements and so forth , and you know the people who are experiencing it . We work with the communities , we work with the fire service .

It was sort of our duh moment of yeah , we watch it all the time , we see it , but nobody's tested it in the lab .

So we need to verify , which is really key , because otherwise the scientific community is not going to get the message , because the firefighters the first thing they did in one of the first things they did in the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012 in Colorado Springs community just into this fire siege was run in and start to knock down wooden fences .

That's one of the first things they did to triage to try to save homes was they knew if the fire reaches this fence , these homes are gone because it was connecting them all like a , like a fuse , and we see that anecdotally over and over again in fires where firefighters have enough time to get in .

That's one of the first things they're going to do is get rid of that link from the fire to the house . And if we put that in our planning , maybe we think about hey , why not use a different material ? Maybe we don't need a fence here .

Let's not create ways for the fire to get to our house so the firefighters aren't running around having to do that while they could be doing other things and while they could be fighting more effectively and more safely .

You have basically different people who would have to pay money for the solution , and if one of those fail to pay money for the solution , the others will not work in an optimal way . Right ? For me , that's a hell of a problem .

How can you say to people you've got to choose between safety and affordability . I mean , how can you do that ? That's to me very criminal . In other words , we want to house people but let's put them in high rises in an inner city that we're not going to do any kind of fire safety . You know we're going to let people just take their chances .

To me it's the same in the wild and urban interface where arguably many , many communities that are built there are more affluent and people think they're buying , they assume they have safety when they buy a home .

You know , in these areas , especially if it's an expensive , nice area , and they aren't getting safety and they have no idea that they're not getting safety

.

And you're absolutely right If one person in a neighborhood does everything right , it does not mean that that one person has all the safety because he's dependent on what's going on in the neighborhood . It's dependent on the neighbors and then taking action as well .

And when people say , you know this stuff costs too much , oh , we don't want , you know , we're not going to continue to , let's say , raise wages for the firefighters in our community . It costs too much and I'm not advocating for that right here at this moment . But when people think that short-term thinking , well , it costs too much .

Well , compared to what is my question , it costs too much compared to what losing the whole community .

Two hour , maybe 60 minutes would be enough because they're cheaper . Like you know , we are willing to spend , or investors are willing , well willing . They are forced to spend so much on fire safety features of their buildings and they're just doing that .

And I would put a claim that it is societally acceptable that a big chunk of your newly built apartment comes from the fire safety features that have been included in the building . So in some way in built environment I'm not talking about single residential houses where you're doing your own engineering judgments .

There are no overlapping laws that tell you that this has to be this minimum characteristic of a product . But in large developments we are paying a hell for safety and if money is the only issue , then let's find the money .

I mean , I wonder if we are at the point where we could showcase a net gain on fireproofing or retrofitting buildings , because if you have fires , that cost you $50 billion or whatever . If you have fires that shut down LaGuardia in New York , I mean , costs are unimaginable .

Of those , if you have $50 billion , you could protect quite a few houses in the US I guess .

That happened at the end of 2021 . They were all in a county called Boulder County , but there were three municipal jurisdictions , if you will . So there was two towns and then there was one part of the county that they call unincorporated .

So the county has jurisdiction and one of the towns had already put in the books that any new construction will have residential fire sprinklers . Great , any new residential construction has fire sprinklers . Well , immediately , because they knew all these homes burned to the ground , there's nothing left .

It's not a retrofit anymore , it's a new build , it's a rebuild they said , oh , we're going to waive that requirement , we're going to take that requirement away for these poor , poor people so they can rebuild their home and it won't cost so much .

So , immediately , that decision putting that out there makes people think , oh , my God , it costs so much to build a home with fire sprinklers , and we know it is not . You know it costs something , but so much . And I said to one of my colleagues I said this is crazy .

What's the next thing they're going to say we don't , we're not going to require proper electrical . He said , oh , they tried that . They tried that all the time . They don't want to come up to the electrical code because it was just good enough . You know the way we were doing it and I'm like what century am I in ? So they waived this and I thought so .

Now you're putting people frankly , it's substandard housing . It's substandard , it is no longer meeting a standard . You're putting people into housing that's less safe than their equivalent neighbors who are building new .

I found that remarkable and , ironically , about a year later we found out there were people taking advantage , people who were having to rebuild a home , many people who did not have enough insurance to cover the total loss of their home .

They were rebuilding taking advantage of some grants that were for what they call passive construction , meaning it was sustainable as well as safe , thick walls , etc . So less heating and cooling for the structure , etc . More energy efficient , because that was one of their values that they held dear was .

I'd always hoped I could afford to live in a home that had these kinds of features . Now I'm getting some help and , yes , I'm going into debt over this because I didn't have enough insurance when my home burned down . But I want this and I thought , wow .

So when industries come out , I'll just say the building industry as a whole comes out and says it's too expensive to build these safety features in . I don't think they're listening to their customers . People actually want safety . They want sustainability . They want these homes that are taking up so much resources to be around for a long time .

They don't want a disposable house okay , they want this to be around for a long time . They want to save energy . They want to live as lightly on the land as they can reduce their carbon footprint , however you want to say it . So I get very frustrated when we isolate oh , sprinklers , that costs too much . Or proper electrical utilities cost too much .

Or now it's oh , it costs too much to put a second staircase in . A bit as well is we need to combine with other trends . That's going on .

When we see that different states where I live here in Massachusetts there's all kinds of incentives to make your home more energy efficient , I have had them come out here . Look at my home and some of the solutions that they offered me on the installation side , I said no , thank you , I do not want that . Like , why don't you want that ?

This is really great for energy efficiency . I said , yeah , of course I'm a fire person . I don't want that in my home . So you got to come up with a different solution for me .

Why are we not thinking making homes safer at the same time as we are making them more sustainable and more energy efficient and safer not just from the fire from within , but definitely the fire from outside ?

Then we could have more incentives towards people actually taking the action that they need to do at the homeowner level , because we cannot expect that people can go out and replace a lot of their structural materials on their own . There need to be incentives to do that .

I know NFPA is big on that to share that knowledge . But how can we democratize fire safety engineering to populations so they know they can use it and benefit out of it ?

And there's a lot of public education in that , which we do a lot of at NFPA , and I think that's something everybody has to commit to . But I also think that we as an engineering community need to talk more about it in a way that regular people understand , so we don't make it so complicated that people go oh my God , no , I can't do this .

It's too much . Even just recognizing what is a fire classification of something that I'm going to go and buy , I'm going to put it on my house . I want something that's fire safe . A regular person would not know what should they look for . They have no idea .

You know , for fire professionals these are very specific definitions . For laymen they mean something completely different . What a challenge that is .

I think people kind of get that and that's a good . But I think there's a lot of assumption that anything I buy must be okay or they wouldn't sell it right , when our market is flooded with goods from countries that could care less about whether it's been tested or listed .

They're just making something to make money and new technologies and new fashions and trends that are really stupid and very unsafe that people are bringing into their homes .

But we can get there , I think , at least on the industry level , professional level , with things like roofing materials , like you said , testing and listing those , and one of the biggest losses that we see I'm just going to give you an analogy with a different hazard One of the biggest insured losses in the United States year after year after year , is hail , and

that's often from vehicles , because you really can't drive the car if the windows are smashed in and it's all dented and things .

So that's a huge loss , because most property casualty insurers are covering vehicles as well as homes . But with homes , yeah , roof tile damage , whatever kind of shingle from hail , is a significant loss year after year after year . And so one of the research groups for the industry is called the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety , ibhs for short .

They have a lab where they've been testing roofing . They actually make their own hail , which is so cool , but anyway they shoot the hail at the panel and so forth . They age roofs out in their property . So they test for the age and all that .

But they came up with a rating for the hail-resistant shingles , which is a big deal because insurers really want to push that . And so everybody , all the companies that had this good shingle , could say so , and one company that had a good new shingle wanted to say so but didn't want to pull their old shingle off the market .

So people are getting told oh , this shingle beats . Oh no , the old shingle doesn't . They said no , you cannot have this rating until you pulled that old shingle off the market , and they did so . The pressure was there because of that . You know the science backed it up .

And then the insurance industry basically said no , we're not going to If we know that you put an inferior shingle on that roof , that's going to affect claims . That's , it's going to affect everything . So so there's a system that worked really , really well to start to get an improvement , to start to drive down those losses .

Now , arguably , from a safety perspective , hail is nothing right . It's a big pain in the butt , loss eventually causing problems down the road , but it's nothing like fire . But I think that the analogy is the testing , listing , marketing , incentives , disincentives can all work in our favor in the fire safety .

When it comes to the wildland , urban interface fires and fires from outside , what are the tests that we have ?

Oh , we are using a flame spread test over here in the US Steiner Tunnel , invented in 1947 , I believe , and invented or developed for dealing with fire on the inside , there's some codes that have fire resistance requirements to the outer walls which is a test for a flash or a fire inside and originally developed for non-combustible construction .

It has nothing to do with the way we build today . So we are using fire tests that are irrelevant for the hazard we are trying to mitigate . So how can we then trust the resulting classification and teach people which products to choose based on that ?

Like you've mentioned , you did your energy audit for your house and let's look at this industry . At least in Poland or in European Union , they've introduced this annoying law of making your energy passport for your buildings .

You know , and you have to get a certification for every single goddamn building , and you think it's unimaginable because there must be hundreds of millions of buildings that need the passport . And guess what ? They have it .

They have it because they've grown a big industry of energy auditors who have found out clever ways how to scale up and do those evaluations very quickly at moderate costs and has just provided this service . Perhaps a fire passport is also something that we need for buildings .

You know , in some way enforcing people to use a qualified fire safety engineer who can tell from the materials and the way how a building is built , where it is located and what their neighbors are doing , what's the strategy for this particular property and where it lands on the asset scale .

But that would require such a tremendous acceptance from the governments , people , local communities , insurers . But perhaps that's the only way . I don't know .

Then we're putting it all on the homeowner to say , oh , you're in the wildland , urban , or you're at risk . I'll just say that you're at risk , you need to do all these things , you need to work with your neighbor . We're chasing we're always chasing this right .

Or to the fire service Well , you've got to do more here to get in and educate , blah , blah , blah . We have not really truly yet it's starting to happen . I think we have not got the private sector engaged in this at all . It is not on their radar .

It is like , okay , and then when we get the interest from people who are hungry to learn more , like we have a certification now at NFPA , credential for certified welfare mitigation specialists .

So , on the idea of what you're talking about with professionals , they don't necessarily have to be engineers because we're working , as Brigitte said , with things that are pretty old , I won't say necessarily outdated , but we need to be building the new science and the new findings into this . But at any rate , they get out there .

They know the basics of the home ignition zone . They know how to tell people about the plants . But then if somebody even scratches the surface a little and says , well , what about this material that I want to put on my house or that my house is already made out of ? They don't know , they don't there .

Isn't that body of knowledge easy for them to access and find out and be able to then advise ? And that's where I think the building industry , the materials industry there's so many folks , the private sector could get engaged in this and say we've got an array of solutions for you . This is what we've been able to say with roofs for a long time .

You've got a lot of options that are going to give you a measure of fire safety , plus other good things like hail resistance or whatever . We haven't been able to say that about the complexity of the exterior of the structure . You know there's people trying to find these solutions very independently .

They really want to be part of a bigger movement and it's sort of what's going to tip it over the edge and I do think it's you feel like well , we keep losing a thousand homes here , 10,000 homes there .

Something's got to give and I think it's that recognition that problem is not going away that hopefully will get us there is we do need qualified people because we have a willing public . That's the thing most people don't realize we have a willing public .

We have what nearly 2 million people engaged in Firewise USA , which is our recognition program , a voluntary neighborhood activity . We're getting close to 2,400 sites around the country . We've got a good number of people in these high-risk areas saying I want to protect my home , I want to protect my community , I'm doing things .

And then you have the private sector ignoring it all and saying after a tragedy , let's pull the safety provisions because it costs too much . So you have a real big disconnect and I think , until we convince the private sector , there's money to be had here , there's profits to be had and there's good things that you can do systematically around this .

I don't think we're going to get there with government and voluntary action alone . I've been working on it for 22 years and we haven't solved it . So that's my take .

But how does it look at large for you ?

We have no idea how the combination of PV panel and class A roof will perform in a wildfire . So I see a potential hazard there .

I see a potential problem where we are adding this for the right reasons , but unfortunately with a result that potentially could be devastating . The same as that goes with other energy retrofits that we can do to our homes . Some of them might not actually make it more fire-saving On the contrary . So I think we need to think about it holistically .

You can't just do one thing without thinking about the other , and that's always a challenge .

We're attempting to go all electric in places where our infrastructure I mean , I'll tell you , right outside my house I've got basically what used to be trees that probably are 100 years old , holding up the electrical wires attached to the house . So we've got , I mean , I call them telephone poles because that's what they were , and now they're utility poles .

But you know , there's still the same wooden pole covered in resin that is highly vulnerable to all kinds of things . Just that one pole , but the whole system is so fragile . And so , you know , we're looking at banking all of our sustainability on an infrastructure that can barely hold us now , and that's also very concerning .

I think we've seen that in California , where the utility in the northern part of the state has really , I mean , been sued , got declared bankruptcy , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah . But people want to demonize the utility . Oh , because they caused the fire and it's like they wouldn't be there if there weren't residential construction going into the .

You know , if there weren't human development going into these areas that are prone to fire , you wouldn't have utility structures out there . So we've got to look at this holistically , as Brigitte says , and I think it dives into things that are way beyond what's the ignitability of this particular structure right here all by itself , isolated .

We have to look at it as a system approach .

Do you see a wee fire safety engineer specialist being a thing in the near future ?

I've talked to several young students and encouraged them to look at this and go this direction , because there are problems to be solved and we need them to solve .

In fact , cal Poly has created its own Louis Fire Institute . That's brand new out in California , but the other traditional , maybe more well-established fire protection engineering schools like Maryland and Worcester and Oklahoma are doing a lot more in this arena already .

Protection engineers who go like , yeah , no , that's not me , I'm like this is a design problem as well , and that's why it's of relevance to engineers .

Recently we had a former colleague from NFPA who's now working on nuclear plants , basically engineering there , and he said I'm looking for somebody , can you send me anybody in this upstate , new York plant that we have to come and advise on the wildfire impacts ? It was really difficult .

It was really difficult to find somebody who was qualified and willing to come up and give a consultation . And so you're already seeing a need for large facilities that are out in places they could be vulnerable . And then I do think , absolutely in the more typical community setting , residential setting and urban setting , that we need the help there .

On our eyes , in front of our eyes , there's an industry growing up and I think it's going to be a very big industry , and that's also a reason why I try to bring topics like this to the Fire Science Show , even if most of my listeners are happy to be learning about the insides of the buildings which we know so much about , right ?

Anyway , Michel , Birgit , it was a pleasure to talk with you both and thanks for this interview and thanks for everything NFPA is doing in this field . You're doing great jobs . Keep it going . Thank you so much .

You've heard it from professors , you've heard it from their students , you've heard it from practitioners and now you've heard it from two high-level NFP officials .

We is a big fire protection engineering problem and something we need to solve , something we still need to find an idea how to solve , and this idea most likely involves scalable solutions for fire protection engineering that we don't have yet . It requires innovation that we don't have yet and it requires involvement of a lot of stakeholders .

You perhaps think that there's no business in this regard because we the single house problem . Perhaps not that interesting from a fire safety engineering perspective at large if you only considered the business perspective , of course but I think that's at the core of the problem .

We need to find how to make it interesting for fire safety engineering and define scalable solutions that we could develop and deliver to the communities at risk , for their benefits , and also creating a market for fire safety engineering engineering . I mean energy auditors did that and they are thriving , so why not ? Let's ?

Let's keep on seeking , because the problem we are at hand is enormous , is growing . We'll only do more damage over the years , we'll only bring fatalities and horror to communities and people and , and I believe , we're responsible for solving it . So , of course , a multifaceted issue .

Thank you , birgit , thank you Michelle , for showing a holistic view over this multifaceted issue . I hope it was fascinating for you all . It was interesting for me for sure . Just pure pleasure to have conversations like this , especially that they carry a large chunk of it themselves .

That's the best part of doing a podcast when your guests are doing all the job for you . Anyway , thank you for being here with me today and see you in the Fire Science Show next Wednesday . Cheers bye , thank you .