Give us an overview of your team and global reach.
We’re a specialist team of over 20 fire engineers across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We also have a number of colleagues in other Tetra Tech companies in the United Kingdom and the United States who we collaborate with to share our collective knowledge, skills and experience.
The work that we do varies from country to country, as the role of a fire engineer is different across each region due to varying regulations and industry frameworks. A key focus of my role is to bring together the best skills and experience from each region to our local offices and projects.
Australian fire engineering is more focused on providing performance-based solutions for projects which allows design teams to depart from more restrictive prescriptive code requirements. The role in the United Kingdom and New Zealand involves much more code consulting, with performance-based assessments an important but less dominant part of the role.
Why did you choose NDY?
For me, these were the biggest factors:
- The opportunity to get involved in challenging world-class projects.
- The ecosystem – NDY has a unique set up which allows global specialist groups such as fire engineering, sustainability, acoustics etc to operate as their own business unit. This enables key strategies and decisions, for example hiring and training, to be made based on the needs of our fire engineering collective. It allows us to hire the best people regardless of location and share work around the group in an agile way. This ensures we have the best possible team on each project, and evens out the peaks and troughs of workload in each location.
- The high profile nature of the fire engineering team within the business – 2 of our Group Executive come from the fire engineering team, including the Australian Regional Director and Global Director of Engineering and Operations. The last 3 Melbourne office directors also started in fire engineering. This says to me that the company understands and respects our specialist discipline, and there are exceptional opportunities for advancement.
Tell us how you work with other teams and disciplines at NDY?
We work across all sectors. Our involvement with other disciplines depends on whether a project is fire engineering only or multidisciplinary.
We have a strong fire engineering business and client base so on many projects we may be the only NDY discipline. In this situation, we still leverage the knowledge and skills within the company by cross-checking some of our solutions before taking these to the client and design team. For example, we have a mechanical engineering team with best-in-class experience of hospital design – mechanical systems in hospitals can be very complex and often need fire engineering solutions due to limitations within prescriptive codes and standards.
For multi-disciplinary projects, the collaboration is much closer. For example, shopping centre design involves close coordination between fire and mechanical engineering in the design of smoke exhaust systems. In data centres, mission critical, and other projects involving energy storage, we’re able to work closely with our electrical engineers.
We also work closely with our colleagues from Hoare Lea in the United Kingdom and Cosentini and Glumac in the United States. We’ve established fire engineering working groups for cross laminated timber, computational fluid dynamics modelling (CFD) and electric vehicle charging to share knowledge and specialist skills. We also work closely on projects and share training.
For me, the opportunity for global collaboration is as good as I’ve seen. It’s something that’s baked into the business goals set by the Group Executive team that I report to, and therefore forms part of the business goals of our fire engineering group.
Expand on your analogy of a doctor and pharmacist in fire engineering?
An analogy that I like is that a fire engineer is like a doctor, who diagnoses the needs of a building (patient) and prescribes the correct design solutions (medicine) which is dispensed by designers (pharmacists). A good fire engineer will have a broad training across all areas (like a doctor does of health and medicine), and will be skilled at evaluating the building’s needs based on a range of factors including technical and non-technical, e.g. regulatory, budget, risk and practicality of implementation.
This analogy shows that our industry and regulators have some work to do to professionalise to the same level as doctors. Fire engineering is a relatively young industry and remains unlicensed in many jurisdictions where no formal education, training or accreditations are required to practice.
Why fire engineering?
I first came across fire engineering in my first year at university. I was in the civil and structural engineering program which starts very broad but allows specialisation in years 3 to 5. After attending an introductory module by a world-leading fire safety professor, I decided to take the fire engineering pathway and graduated with a Masters of Structural and Fire Safety Engineering.
I was attracted by two things. Firstly, the introductory topics were fascinating and included the history of major fire events, the dynamics of fire, human behaviour and evacuation plus the various active fire systems to mitigate the effects of fire. Secondly, the professor gave a strong pitch for the career prospects that could follow. He said it was likely that we would have multiple job offers from eager companies long before graduation, plus opportunities to work on world-class buildings with rapid career progression once in the industry. This turned out to be 100% accurate.
Give an example of a difficult problem that you’ve solved?
There are unique fire safety problems to solve in all projects, and my whole career has involved developing fire strategies and solutions for challenging projects and problems.
Some examples would be in developing fire strategies and solutions for:
- Secure buildings such as prisons and airports, where exits may need to be locked due to risks beyond just fire. I’ve been involved in a number of prison and airport projects and worked with the Department of Justice in Victoria in updating their guidelines and Sydney Airport in developing fire strategies for all of their terminals.
- Heritage buildings where there’s a desire to retain existing structures that don’t meet current codes.
- Sports stadia where there’s a history of disasters.
- Theatres where there are high fuel loads and high populations.
- High rise buildings or underground mass transit underground stations and tunnels where both occupant escape plus fire brigade access are constrained.
One specific example that comes to mind is when I was asked if I could justify removal of a sprinkler system from a nuclear storage facility. Typically, removing sprinklers from storage facilities is not a good idea for a number of reasons – life safety, fire fighter safety plus it presents insurance problems for building owners and tenants. In this case, sprinkler runoff presented an environmental concern and there were various mitigating considerations.
For example, the contents were to be sealed within steel drums and filled with concrete (hard to burn!), the facility had extremely onerous management procedures (as would be expected in the world of nuclear). The roof was also too high for sprinklers to be effective even if they were installed.
We were able to develop a customised approach where sprinklers were substituted for non-required smoke detection and exhaust to enable early warning and maintain smoke-free egress routes and fire brigade access routes with timber storage pallets substituted for steel. The fire brigade is always a key stakeholder, and bringing them along on the journey was critical. We brought the brigade out to the existing site to enable them to better understand the facility and strict management processes and we were able to agree on a solution that they were comfortable with.
What’s an engineering myth you’d like to debunk?
That fire engineering is all ‘smoke and mirrors’ or a ‘dark art’. I always flinch when I hear these phrases.
The issue I believe stems from fire engineering being a relatively new industry – starting in Australia in 1990. In many parts of the world, there’s no accreditation scheme or education requirement, and limited university courses.
For me, fire engineering should be based on sound engineering principles, science and logic. I once had a facilities manager for a major client tell me that fire engineers were no better than used car salesmen. It took some effort to build up trust with this person – bringing him along on the regulatory process and talking through the analysis that underpinned our advice.
I believe all of us in the industry have a duty to raise the bar of the profession. A key part of this is in bringing in new engineers and providing them with training. This is something NDY has done well over many years. At present, we’re supporting 4 fire engineers who are studying for their masters and working at the same time, all in offices and studying at 3 different universities.
What do you do outside of work that helps fuel your creativity and commitment to engineering?
My 3-year old son is a keen construction enthusiast. He’s the toughest project manager I’ve worked with and demands a high level of commitment and creative imagination. Some of the civil and structural engineering projects that I’ve been tasked with defy the laws of physics and gravity. I was tasked at the weekend with digging a hole to Peru with a pile of sticks and a dump truck. I got further than expected.
I’m also a keen photographer which is a hobby with a good blend of creativity and technical mastery. It is helps me to find a bit of zen too by stopping to appreciate the moment and surroundings.
What professional relationships do you value the most?
My team, engineering is a team sport. A strong team culture is the key to success and also a lot of fun.
What does Making Spaces Work mean to you?
From a fire engineering perspective, it means developing fire strategies and performance-based solutions that provide better design outcomes than by following the one-size-fits-all building code. To do this well, it’s important to have a deep appreciation of other design disciplines and experience of seeing in practice what works well and what doesn’t. It requires engagement with all stakeholders in the process to understand their drivers and constraints.
Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of fire engineering performance solutions that are innovative in theory but a headache for building owners and tenants.
