Fire Protection Engineering (also known as fire engineering or fire safety engineering) is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people and their environments from the destructive effects of fire and smoke.
The discipline of fire protection engineering includes, but is not exclusive to:
- Active fire protection - fire suppression systems, and fire alarm.
- Passive fire protection - fire and smoke barriers, space separation
- Smoke control and management
- Escape facilities- Emergency exits, Fire lifts etc.
- Building design, layout, and space planning
- Fire prevention programs
- Fire dynamics and fire modeling
- Human behavior during fire events
- Risk analysis, including economic factors
- Wildfire Management
Fire protection engineers identify risks and design safeguards that aid in preventing, controlling, and mitigating the effects of fires. Fire protection engineers assist architects, building owners and developers in evaluating buildings' life safety and property protection goals. FPEs are also employed as fire investigators, including such very large-scale cases as the analysis of the collapse of the World Trade Centers. NASA uses fire protection engineers in its space program to help improve safety. Fire protection engineers are also employed to provide 3rd party review for performance based fire engineering solutions submitted in support of local building regulation applications.
Read more about Fire Protection Engineering: History, Education, Professional Registration
Famous quotes containing the words fire, protection and/or engineering:
“The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw on his head when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s hat.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)