SFPE Guide to Human Behavior in Fire

SFPE Guide to Human Behavior in Fire
Author: Society of Fire Protection Engineers
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2018-11-14
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319946978

This single resource for the fire safety community distills the most relevant and useful science and research into a consensus-based guide whose key factors and considerations impact the response and behavior of occupants of a building during a fire event. The Second Edition of SFPE's Engineering Guide: Human Behavior in Fire provides a common introduction to this field for the broad fire safety community: fire protection engineers/fire safety engineers, human behavior scientists/researchers, design professionals, and code authorities. The public benefits from consistent understanding of the factors that influence the responses and behaviors of people when threatened by fire and the application of reliable methodologies to evaluate and estimate human response in buildings and structures. This Guide also aims to lessen the uncertainties in the "people components" of fire safety and allow for more refined analysis with less reliance on arbitrary safety factors. As with fire science in general, our knowledge of human behavior in fire is growing, but is still characterized by uncertainties that are traceable to both limitation in the science and unfamiliarity by the user communities. The concepts for development of evacuation scenarios for performance-based designs and the technical methods to estimate evacuation response are reviewed with consideration to the limitation and uncertainty of the methods. This Guide identifies both quantitative and qualitative information that constitutes important consideration prior to developing safety factors, exercising engineering judgment, and using evacuation models in the practical design of buildings and evacuation procedures. Besides updating material in the First Edition, this revision includes new information on: Incapacitating Effects of Fire Effluent & Toxicity Analysis Methods Occupant Behavior Scnearios Movement Models and Behavioral Models Egress Model Selection, Verification, and Validation Estimation of Uncertainty and Use of Safety Factors Enhancing Human Response to Emergencies & Notification of Messaging The prediction of human behavior during a fire emergency is one of the most challenging areas of fire protection engineering. Yet, understanding and considering human factors is essential to designing effective evacuation systems, ensuring safety during a fire and related emergency events, and accurately reconstructing a fire.

Wildland Fire Behaviour

Wildland Fire Behaviour
Author: Mark A. Finney
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 675
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1486309100

Wildland fires have an irreplaceable role in sustaining many of our forests, shrublands and grasslands. They can be used as controlled burns or occur as free-burning wildfires, and can sometimes be dangerous and destructive to fauna, human communities and natural resources. Through scientific understanding of their behaviour, we can develop the tools to reliably use and manage fires across landscapes in ways that are compatible with the constraints of modern society while benefiting the ecosystems. The science of wildland fire is incomplete, however. Even the simplest fire behaviours – how fast they spread, how long they burn and how large they get – arise from a dynamical system of physical processes interacting in unexplored ways with heterogeneous biological, ecological and meteorological factors across many scales of time and space. The physics of heat transfer, combustion and ignition, for example, operate in all fires at millimetre and millisecond scales but wildfires can become conflagrations that burn for months and exceed millions of hectares. Wildland Fire Behaviour: Dynamics, Principles and Processes examines what is known and unknown about wildfire behaviours. The authors introduce fire as a dynamical system along with traditional steady-state concepts. They then break down the system into its primary physical components, describe how they depend upon environmental factors, and explore system dynamics by constructing and exercising a nonlinear model. The limits of modelling and knowledge are discussed throughout but emphasised by review of large fire behaviours. Advancing knowledge of fire behaviours will require a multidisciplinary approach and rely on quality measurements from experimental research, as covered in the final chapters.

Principles of Fire Behavior and Combustion

Principles of Fire Behavior and Combustion
Author: Richard Gann
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2013-12-03
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1284056104

Based on the National Fire Academy’s Fire Behavior and Combustion model curriculum. Without a comprehensive grasp of how fires start and spread, informed decisions on how to best control and extinguish fires can not be made. Principles of Fire Behavior and Combustion, Fourth Edition will provide readers with a thorough understanding of the chemical and physical properties of flammable materials and fire, the combustion process, and the latest in suppression and extinguishment. The Fourth Edition of this time-tested resource is the most current and accurate source of fire behavior information available to fire science students and on-the-job fire fighters today.

Alliances in the Anthropocene

Alliances in the Anthropocene
Author: Christine Eriksen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2020-02-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811525331

This book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.

Fire

Fire
Author: Frances D. Burton
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826346480

The association between our ancestors and fire, somewhere around six to four million years ago, had a tremendous impact on human evolution, transforming our earliest human ancestor, a being communicating without speech but with insight, reason, manual dexterity, highly developed social organization, and the capability of experimenting with this new technology. As it first associated with and then began to tame fire, this extraordinary being began to distance itself from its primate relatives, taking a path that would alter its environment, physiology, and self-image. Based on her extensive research with nonhuman primates, anthropologist Frances Burton details the stages of the conquest of fire and the systems it affected. Her study examines the natural occurrence of fire and describes the effects light has on human physiology. She constructs possible variations of our earliest human ancestor and its way of life, utilizing archaeological and anthropological evidence of the earliest human-controlled fires to explore the profound physical and biological impacts fire had on human evolution.

The Proceedings of 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology

The Proceedings of 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology
Author: Guan-Yuan Wu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 1061
Release: 2019-09-12
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9813291397

This book features selected papers from the 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST 2018), held in Taipei, Taiwan. Covering the entire spectrum of fire safety science, it focuses on research on fires, explosions, combustion science, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, risk analysis and structural engineering, as well as other topics. Presenting advanced scientific insights, the book introduces and advances new ideas in all areas of fire safety science. As such it is a valuable resource for academic researchers, fire safety engineers, and regulators of fire, construction and safety authorities. Further it provides new ideas for more efficient fire protection.

The Pyrocene

The Pyrocene
Author: Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520383591

A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.​ The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet. Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.

Fires and Human Behaviour

Fires and Human Behaviour
Author: David Canter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2024-06-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040052363

This second edition of Fires and Human Behaviour was originally published in 1990 and since the first edition in 1980 there continued to be considerable loss of life in small and large fires throughout the world. The most significant of these from a behavioural point of view was the Kings Cross underground station in 1988. This was a relatively small fire caused by inappropriate human actions. What appeared to remain timeless and of value ten years after the first edition was published were the details of what actually happens in fires and the psychological models that emerged from studying those details. This second edition was therefore edited to keep the original detailed case studies and to add information about some major incidents that had occurred since 1980.

Fire Safety of Historical Buildings

Fire Safety of Historical Buildings
Author: Gabriele Bernardini
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2017-04-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319557440

This book applies a behavioral point of view to individuals’ fire safety in historic buildings. It outlines theoretical and operative issues, based on recent studies and international guidelines. Firstly, critical issues for Building Heritage fire safety are widely discussed, by including the modelling of human factor and man-environment-fire interference in these architectural spaces. A significant part of the book includes a discussion on emergency modeling and simulation. A source code for representing the fire evacuation process (including man-evacuation facilities interactions) is offered to the reader. Methods for effectiveness assessment of risk-reducing solutions are provided and tested in a case-study. Being a structured approach to occupants-related problems during a fire in heritage buildings, it offers an innovative methodology and practical examples that researchers and designers can use as a guide when proposing and testing solutions. Evaluation indexes for effectiveness assessment (also useful for future guidelines or handbooks) are included. Readers are encouraged to understand these indexes within the proposed approach, so as to extend their applications and possibilities of how to introduce human behaviors-based solutions in other fields. Lastly, attention is focused on the proposal and evaluation of low-impact and not-invasive strategies, such as ones based on wayfinding elements. From this point of view, the pros and cons of wayfinding systems are discussed: these are important today, especially for fire-safety designers, because of the ongoing innovations in this field.