FIRE SAFETY ENGINEERING

Fire Service Intervention Model (FSIM)
Paul Grimwood is an experienced operational fire officer (retired) and now a Fire Safety Engineer with a career spanning across four decades and five continents. The former inner city London & New York fire officer and Fire Safety Engineer with WSP Fire Engineering is now a Principal Fire Safety Engineer with Kent Fire & Rescue Service in the UK.

This website is for the Fire Safety (Protection) Engineer and also for the operational Fire Officer who may both impact on each others work in several ways. We take a close look at firefighting water requirements as well as various and innovative fire protection and smoke management features commonly installed, that might have some direct effect on the firefighting strategies and tactics employed by firefighters..

This website is an information portal only and serves no commercial purpose. Copyright remains with the authors of individual papers and contributions.

Fire-fighting Water Requirements
As a former operational Firefighter who served in London and New York Paul Grimwood understands just how important it is to provide effective water flow-rates at the nozzle! Now a Principal Fire Safety Engineer with Kent Fire & Rescue he continues to research fire-ground water requirements and needed flow-rate at the nozzle to assist Fire Engineers around the world.

It is clear that there are major differences between water needs depending on common methods of construction, equipment used by the fire service and also the tactics they use. For example, timber construction, venting tactics and PPV may all cause a fire to burn with greater rates of heat release. Also, some nozzles used will flow very low for small changes in pressure and there are well established critical flow-rates, below which the fire will force Firefighters out of the fire floor!

Whilst there are several approaches taken to estimating needed flow-rates using complex engineering calculations, this website will explore a wide range of solutions aimed at real world needs. A careful analyses of some well known and established methods will demonstrate critical flaws within the methodology used to predict firefighting water requirements

This website will also assist the Fire Commander, pump operator or fire-ground engineer to gain an appreciation of needed flow-rates that are so critical in gaining a tactical advantage at fires. Perhaps more importantly, it may prompt you to take a close look at your flow capability per engine or hose-line crew. By optimizing your flow from source to fire, the performance capability of a hose-line crew may be increased by 100%. This fact may enable your firefighters to handle even greater levels of fire involvement with the same resource deployment.

'There is no doubt whatsoever that an effective and hard hitting flow-rate is more useful to a firefighter than a poorly flowed fog pattern'

Firefighter Safety
The website also explores how various fire safety design strategies may impact upon operational fire-fighting tactics and strategic approaches.

NEW TFR 1989 Flow-rate Research & SFPE (NZ) TP 2004/1

The views expressed throughout this website are those of the author or the authorities responsible for the various articles and technical papers. This content is not representative of any other organization unless listed.