The original World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City was destroyed during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, after being struck by two hijacked commercial airliners. One World Trade Center was hit at 8:46 a.m. Eastern time and collapsed at 10:28 a.m. Two World Trade Center was hit at 9:03 a.m. and collapsed at 9:59 a.m. The resulting debris severely damaged or destroyed more than a dozen other adjacent and nearby structures, ultimately leading to the collapse of 7 World Trade Center at 5:21 p.m.
Fire protection engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people, property, and their environments from the harmful and destructive effects of fire and smoke. It encompasses engineering which focuses on fire detection, suppression and mitigation and fire safety engineering which focuses on human behavior and maintaining a tenable environment for evacuation from a fire. In the United States 'fire protection engineering' is often used to include 'fire safety engineering'.
The Buncefield fire was a major fire at an oil storage facility on 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, located near the M1 motorway, Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, England. The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60 million Imperial gallons of fuel. The terminal is owned by TOTAL UK Limited (60%) and Texaco (40%).
The Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) is an international professional association for fire fighting professionals and fire science researchers. Founded in 1918, IFE is headquartered in Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire in the United Kingdom. The IFE is an Ofqual recognised Awarding Organisation.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, generally referred to as the Chemical Safety Board or CSB, is an independent U.S. federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the agency's board members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate. The CSB conducts root cause investigations of chemical accidents at fixed industrial facilities.
The BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering is the research group at The Institute of Infrastructure and Environment, University of Edinburgh conducting research in fire, structures and environment.
Dr. W. Gene Corley, P.E. was an American structural engineer and "preeminent expert on building collapse investigations and building codes." Corley was the Senior Vice President of CTLGroup from 1987 to 2013, where he led structural engineering projects, including numerous evaluations of buildings and structures damaged by earthquake, explosions, and from terrorist attacks. He led the investigation of structural performance of the Murrah Building following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the World Trade Center Building Performance Study in 2001-2002 following the September 11, 2001 attacks. He died on March 1, 2013. He was 77.
José Luis Torero FRSE FRSN is the Head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London. He took this appointment after two years (2017-2019) as the John L. Bryan Chair in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering and Director of the Center for Disaster Resilience in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland (USA). He was formerly the Head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland (2012-2017). He is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) since 2010, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering since 2014 and The Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK) since 2008. He held the BRE/RAE Chair in Fire Safety Engineering and directed the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering from 2004 to 2012. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, being gazetted in the NSW Government Gazette by the then Governor of New South Wales His Excellency General, the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC(Rtd).
Howard Wilson Emmons (1912–1998) was an American professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Harvard University. During his career he conducted original research on fluid mechanics, combustion and fire safety. Today he is most widely known for his pioneering work in the field of fire safety engineering. He has been called "the father of modern fire science" for his contribution to the understanding of flame propagation and fire dynamics. He also helped design the first supersonic wind tunnel, identified a signature of the transition to turbulence in boundary layer flows, and was the first to observe compressor stall in a gas turbine compressor. He initiated studies on diffusion flames inside a boundary layer, and Emmons problem is named after him. He was eventually awarded the Timoshenko Medal by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the 1968 Sir Alfred Egerton Gold Medal from The Combustion Institute.
David J. Icove is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation Criminal Profiler and FBI Academy Instructor in the elite Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was one of the FBI's first criminal profilers to specialize in the apprehension of serial arsonists and bombers. He is Fellow in the National Academy of Forensic Engineers and co-author of Kirk's Fire Investigation, the leading textbook in the field of fire investigation.
The limiting oxygen concentration (LOC), also known as the minimum oxygen concentration (MOC), is defined as the limiting concentration of oxygen below which combustion is not possible, independent of the concentration of fuel. It is expressed in units of volume percent of oxygen. The LOC varies with pressure and temperature. It is also dependent on the type of inert (non-flammable) gas.
Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where he is also Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Director of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics (KACST) at Stanford. He also serves on the Space Technology Industry-Government-University Roundtable.
The Arthur B. Guise Medal is awarded annually by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers and recognizes eminent achievement in the advancement of the science and technology of fire protection engineering and is named in memory of the achievements of Arthur Guise.
The Fire and Blast Information Group (FABIG) is a not-for-profit, membership based organization created in the UK in 1992 in the wake of the Piper Alpha disaster to continue the sharing and dissemination of expert knowledge on fires and explosions arising from the major research projects carried out in the early 1990s.
Fire Safety Journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal dealing with original and multidisciplinary research on all aspects of the science and engineering of fire, fire safety and fire protection. Topics include but are not limited to chemistry and physics of fire, fire dynamics, explosions, fire protection systems, detection, suppression, structural response, structural protection, fire investigations, design, people/fire interactions, risk, management, legislation, and education. It is the official journal of the International Association for Fire Safety Science and is published by Elsevier.
FLACS is a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software used extensively for explosion modeling and atmospheric dispersion modeling within the field of industrial safety and risk assessment. Main application areas of FLACS are in petrochemical, process manufacturing, food processing, wood processing, metallurgical, and nuclear safety industries.
Elaine Surick Oran is an American physical scientist and is considered a world authority on numerical methods for large-scale simulation of physical systems. She has pioneered computational technology for the solution of complex reactive flow problems, unifying concepts from science, mathematics, engineering and computer science in a new methodology. An incredibly diverse range of phenomena can be modeled and better understood using her techniques for numerical simulation of fluid flows, ranging from the tightly-grouped movements of fish in Earth's oceans to the explosions of far-flung supernovae in space. Her work has contributed significantly to the advancement of the engineering profession.
Vladimir Zakhmatov is an independent expert at the international level of explosions and fire-fighting, well-known scientist in the field of physics of combustion and explosion, developer of modern impulse fire-extinguishing devices and systems, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Professor, active member of the International Academy of Ecology and Safety , the New York Academy of Sciences (USA), Ukrainian Academy of Life Safety (Ukraine).
Venkatesh Kumar R Kodur, born in Kodur village in Karnataka India, received his bachelor's degree in Civil engineering from the University Visveswaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, in 1984. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Queen’s University, Canada, in 1988 and 1992, respectively. Following a brief stint as a Post-doctoral Fellow at Royal Military College, Kingston, Canada, he joined the National Research Council (Canada), where as senior scientist, he carried out extensive research in structural fire safety field. In 2005, he joined the faculty of Michigan State University (MSU), where he is currently a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Kodur has established unique fire test facilities and highly acclaimed research program in structural fire engineering area at MSU and is the founding director of the Center on Structural Fire Safety and Diagnostics.
Erica Kuligowski is a social research scientist who studies human behavior during emergencies and the performance of evacuation models in disasters. She currently works at the Engineering Lab of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducting research on fire disasters and leading the NIST Hurricane Maria Project.
