By Allison Chisolm

Editor's Note: In early June, more than 100 architects, engineers, building code and fire department officials, attorneys, insurance executives, building owners, researchers and academics from around the world gathered at WPI to discuss a new way of thinking about fire safety in buildings. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, participants examined the barriers standing in the way of implementing new fire safety design methods in the United States and abroad.

According to conference chair David A. Lucht, director of WPI's Center for Firesafety Studies, since the turn of the century the usual focus of building design has been to "meet the code," rather than to assure that occupants can escape safely before being overcome by fire and smoke. The alternative is known as the performance-based code approach to design and regulatory practice.

New performance-based model fire safety codes, being developed by such organizations as the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association, are expected to be available in the United States by 2000, although a host of technical, social, legal, economic, political and institutional concerns will have to be overcome to ensure a smooth transition to this new paradigm. Those charged with considering and implementing performance-based codes can learn a few lessons from Australia and New Zealand, which were among the first nations in the world to adopt such codes. Among the individuals behind the success stories in those two countries are three WPI graduates. They include Peter Johnson, who spoke about his experience at the recent WPI conference. Here are the stories of these three fire safety pioneers.

Peter Johnson
There are buildings under construction today in Australia that could not have been built five years ago because they defy traditional building code classifications. They are under way, in part, thanks to the passion of Peter Johnson '86 (M.S.), who helped bring about his country's adoption of performance-based building codes that recognized the value of technological advances in fire safety engineering--advances he learned about while studying at WPI.

Johnson is a principal in the Melbourne office of Ove Arup and Partners, an international consulting firm with 4,000 employees in more than 40 countries. Since joining the company in 1995, he has established and nurtured its fire safety practice, opened new offices in Sydney and Brisbane, and worked on projects around the world, including Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, New York's JFK International Airport, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Scottish Gallery of Art and Design, and the Homebush Bay Rail Station in Sydney, site of the 2000 Summer Olympics.

Johnson's determination to revise and unify Australia's building codes has taken him on an interesting journey. By the time he enrolled at WPI in the mid-1980s, he'd earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Monash University in Melbourne and had spent a decade testing fire detection and suppression systems at the government's Scientific Services Laboratory in Melbourne. "I was keen to do further study," he says. "I had seen where fire safety design was going."

After reading a textbook on fire protection engineering that Dougal Drysdale of the University of Edinburgh wrote while he was a visiting professor at WPI, Johnson made plans to study for a master's degree in Scotland. But after that program was discontinued, he came to WPI, instead, to earn his master's. When he returned to his laboratory, he was the only person in his country with an advanced degree in the field. "I could go out and practice risk assessment and fire protection to my heart's content," he says. He worked on everything from hospitals to computer centers and even evaluated buildings used for scientific research on Australia's bases in Antarctica.

But his education had given him a new perspective on the emerging field of fire safety. "In the past," he says, "fire safety was governed by prescriptive rules. It was a cookbook approach to evaluating buildings. Every state in Australia had its own building codes."

During the past 20 years, however, building construction has seen a slow but steady infiltration of engineering design principles that use computer modeling and complex research to quantify risk and compare alternative design solutions. Johnson became convinced of the value of a nationwide, performance-based building code that would enable architects and engineers to ensure that fire safety features suit a building, instead of fitting the building to a set of code classifications.

"When used appropriately," says Johnson, "performance-based designs result in equal or better levels of fire safety and more functional buildings. They encourage flexibility and innovation and ultimately produce more cost-effective structures." For example, he says, where codes once proscribed how far apart exits must be, they now specify only that the placement of exits must permit the safe evacuation of a building in the event of a fire. "It's up to the engineer to make that decision based on a series of analyses and engineering design methods," he says.

In 1989, Johnson joined a group led by Professor Vaughan Beck, a visiting fellow at the Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering at the University of Sydney. They set out to investigate the use of risk assessment tools and a rational engineering approach to fire safety design of buildings.

The group expanded to include 75 Australian fire safety specialists and several visiting experts. Johnson and six others stayed on to write the Warren Centre's final report, which is considered a landmark in the development of performance-based approaches, internationally. The team of seven stayed together and became major contributors to the Building Regulation Review Task Force convened by the federal and state governments in 1981. The resulting National Building Fire Safety Systems Code is "still regarded worldwide as one of the first attempts to provide a systematic approach to the design of fire safety in buildings," says Johnson, who notes that "the draft as it stood was useful to researchers but not for practitioners."

To adapt the code to more practical applications, Beck began offering a fire safety course at Victoria University of Technology; Johnson was involved in course development and lecturing. Some of his lectures were based on the risk assessment methods Johnson had learned from Professor Robert Fitzgerald at WPI. "Fitzgerald foresaw how risk assessment could be a powerful technology to predict rare events with severe consequences," Johnson says.

In 1994, the group, which Johnson says wanted desperately to get beyond the draft stage for their proposed code, founded the Fire Code Reform Center as a not-for-profit facility to manage fire research in Australia. Today the center has a $7.5 million budget and collects funds from government agencies and individual donors and allocates them to key research centers around the country.

During the following year, Johnson served as author, project manager and principal research consultant for a project that led to the center's publication of the Fire Engineering Guidelines, a design guide for fire safety practitioners in the building industry. The center recently underwent an international review, with WPI Adjunct Professor Craig Beyler and master's program alumnus Brian J. Meacham '84,'91 (M.S.), research director at the Society for Fire Protection Engineers, among the reviewers. Johnson reports with justifiable pride that their review of the guidelines characterized it as "a fundamental document, far ahead of anything else in the field, with a major impact on international standards." In fact, Finland has already begun to use it.

"Australia is now at the forefront of building fire safety design," says Johnson. "We're seeing a steady flow of Americans coming over to see how things work here." While he remains modest about his role in changing the face of Australian building regulations, he does acknowledge one important contributor to his success. "All of this I owe to WPI," he says. "If I hadn't enrolled there for my master's degree in fire protection engineering, I might still be testing fire detectors."

Alison Wakelin
Growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, Alison Wakelin always wanted to live overseas and do further study. With the opportunity to come to WPI, she realized it would be possible to combine those goals.

After three semesters in Worcester, she earned a master's degree in fire protection engineering in 1997. Her graduate studies were funded by her employer, Holmes Consulting Group, and by a national fellowship for young civil engineers.

Wakelin studied civil engineering in college and worked as a structural engineer. She learned about fire protection engineering from a senior colleague. The field appealed to her particularly because in 1993, New Zealand became one of the first countries in the world to implement a performance-based building code. "The new code makes our jobs more intellectually stimulating," she says. "There can be significant benefits by not being constrained by rigid rules."

To further her career, however, Wakelin knew she needed additional training. She selected WPI because she believed it had the best and best-known program. Her stay in Worcester dismantled many of her misperceptions about America. She found that the United States was not covered by highways and parking lots, that Americans eat fresh fruits and vegetables--as well as junk food--and that the country has a lot of uncultivated land. (New Zealand, whose landmass is slightly smaller than that of Colorado, contains far more rolling pasture than the hills of New England.)

It took her nearly a year to adapt to American culture, but as graduation approached she found she didn't want to go home. She did, though, because "many people had shown faith in getting me to Worcester and I owed them the courtesy of coming back."

Wakelin also felt obligated to share the benefit of what she'd learned--her time at WPI had opened her eyes to new approaches in her field. But, she says, she found few companies undertaking the type of industrial construction that would enable her to practice the new technologies and techniques she'd learned.

In October 1998, Wakelin moved back to the United States and began a new job with Hughes Associates Inc. in Baltimore. "The company is more research-based," she explains, "with projects of a national scope. It has its own lab, which my former employer in Auckland didn't have."

Wakelin continues to reflect on her time at WPI, particularly as challenges come up at work. "I got a lot out of going to WPI," she says, "that I wouldn't have gotten anywhere else."

Colleen Wade
Colleen Wade '96 (M.S.) didn't want to be just another architect or engineer. While interested in the building industry, she says, "I've always liked to do things a bit differently."

In her last year of a two-year building science honors program, the New Zealand native took a course on fire in buildings that made her realize there was more science in the field than she had believed. Her final research project was on principles of smoke movement in buildings.

Young engineers realize quickly they need a specialization, and Wade found fire was a good way to set her apart from her peers. She also realized she needed further study, but there weren't many fire programs at the graduate level. "WPI seemed to pop out," she says. "It was considered to have the best program, a good reputation and a good faculty."

Wade spent the 1994-95 academic year in Worcester, taking a full course load. "It was very intensive," she recalls, "but I didn't mind that at all. It was an enjoyable challenge." Her employer, the Building Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ), paid her tuition and major expenses. She completed her thesis project in Wellington, staying in touch with her advisor, Jonathan Barnett, associate professor of fire protection engineering, via e-mail. Her research, a project for BRANZ, was a room fire model incorporating fire growth in combustible lining materials.

Fire protection engineering is different from other disciplines, Wade says. It draws from many other areas, such as heat transfer, fluid dynamics and building structure materials. "And there's always an opportunity to apply research to practical projects."

That's especially true in New Zealand, where a performance-based building code requires fire protection engineers to demonstrate a building's compliance with current codes, even if it doesn't strictly meet all its requirements. "The building code has a prescriptive solution," she says, "and a performance-based design permits you to make changes where the requirements are excessive or unreasonable, or when the architect has different ideas."

Wade worked in fire research with BRANZ for 11 years before joining Connell Wagner Ltd. in Wellington. She recently returned to BRANZ. Since coming home to New Zealand, she has helped review fire-related aspects of the country's building code, which, she says, presents "another avenue for getting research results into practice." She's also participated in the peer review of the design for Wellington's new national museum, Te Papa. The building's design, which includes several large atria and floors that open to each other, presented a challenge to the fire protection engineers (Fire Risk Consultants Ltd.) regarding smoke spread and evacuation times. A computer simulation helped determine the best escape routes and demonstrated the effectiveness of using fans to blow air into some of the building's protected escape routes to clear away smoke.

Now that fellow New Zealander Alison Wakelin has returned to the United States, Wade is one of just five female fire protection engineers in her country. (In earlier years, she was the only woman working in fire protection engineering in New Zealand.) That distinction doesn't concern her much. She'd rather be known for her specialization in fire protection. As she says, "I've just got on and done the job."