Engineering fire safety: some selected papers - Law's Rules

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002 by Max Fordham

By Margaret Law. Arup. 2002. Papers can be downloaded from www.arup.com/fire

This book is about fire engineering. At the same time it is a general book to dip into. I cannot think of any class of person who should not have a copy. Certainly, everyone in the construction industry should read it from cover to cover.

To begin with, it is an example of scientific writing. Scientific writing tends to be incomprehensible and loaded with special technical terminology. It is supposed to be impersonal so that scientific truth can be perceived without any emotional interference. These papers are clear and understandable without abandoning the correct impersonal, scientific style.

Fire engineering does not deal with easy physics but these papers present the physics in a complete and very comprehensible way. They should be used as a model for modern construction research papers, which tend to conceal how little they have to say in a sea of jargon and bombast.

I first came into contact with Margaret Law's writing when Peter Dunican at Arup asked me to read Paper 2 of this book 'Heat radiation from fires and building separation', which was first published in 1963. It presents a set of rules on town planning predicated on the need to prevent fires from spreading. We may not agree that these rules are sufficient for town planning, but I think we should accept them as necessary. The issues about the rate of growth of fires are interesting in the context of the attack on the World Trade Center. While the fire load of the fuel was not overwhelmingly large, the flammability meant that the rate of growth of the fire was almost explosive and led to almost instantaneous flashover. I wish Margaret Law was still available to consider this aspect of dealing with deliberately created fires.

While most of the papers are about straightforward fire engineering issues, they also cover wider issues about the building design process and the relationship of regulation to design and rational engineering evaluation of risk. Running through the papers there is the theme that logical scientific thought is needed for underpinning engineering judgement. This is the thesis which we should adopt, not only as engineers, but also politicians backed-up by journalists who develop the judgement of the populace.