David Rush

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering

Approximately 1 billion people in the world still live in informal settlements with comparatively low living standards and outdated firefighting equipment. In recent years, informal settlement fires have occurred frequently and globally, however, research into informal settlement fires in the Far East remains underdeveloped. This work briefly summa...

The analysis of the current state of fire statistics and data collection in Europe and other countries is needed to increase awareness of how fire incidents affect buildings and to support pan-European fire prevention and fire mitigation measures. The terminology and data collected regarding fire incidents in buildings in the EU Member States were...

A well-defined terminology of fire-related variables is important for correct analyses and supporting knowledge-based decisions regarding the evaluation of building fires at the European level. After developing an overview of current practices for fire statistics in Part I, the terminology used and the data collected by the EU Member States and eig...

Previous full-scale fire studies revealed that the role of wind on fire spread between informal settlement dwellings was critical. However, the influence of wind conditions on informal settlement dwellings fire spread is currently understudied in the literature. This study aimed to investigate the effect of external wind conditions on fire spread b...

There is a persistent risk of large-scale fire conflagrations in informal settlements, which can threaten hundreds of people simultaneously. Although the literature implies that wind conditions have a significant impact on these fires, little is known about how wind conditions affect the dynamics and spread of flames in informal settlements. In ord...

The investigation of fire incidents in buildings is essential in understanding the consequences on occupants and property. Moreover, a fundamental role in life safety and property protection is represented by the minutes after the fire ignition. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the effects that the discovery time of occupants and response time...

A structure, during its life, may be subjected to multiple hazards. These hazards are sometimes combined over a short period of time, or in some cases occur many years apart, with the first hazard influencing the structural response under a second hazard. A reinforced concrete (RC) structure previously damaged by fire and then exposed to seismic lo...

The temperature heterogeneity due to fire in large open-plan office compartments is closely associated with fire spread behaviour and has been historically limited to experimental investigations using timber cribs. This study explores the ability of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models, specifically the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), to reprod...

EU FireStat project brings together the knowledge and experience of nine different international fire safety institutions. The project maps the existing fire data collected across Member States and proposed meaningful data sets to allow decisions on fire safety at Member State and at EU level. This project was carried out by a consortium composed o...

The behaviour of pre-code reinforced concrete (RC) columns in sequence of fire and earthquake is not well understood and can be critical in case of buildings which experienced fire and are either unrepaired or poorly repaired when exposed to an earthquake. This study proposes a framework on how to construct a simplified model to assess the post-fir...

A series of numerical experiments have been carried out through a CFD code, namely Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), to analyze the influence of the fire heat source location (transversal, longitudinal and vertical positions) on the hot gas layer temperature (HGLT) in pre-flashover compartment fires. Knowing the HGLT helps engineers to predict the ons...

The term resilience is being more widely adopted in fire safety engineering, however, its comprehensive description is not clearly explained or correctly applied in practice. This study, therefore, defines the categories, dimensions, characteristics, capacities, objectives and missions possessed by resilience to provide a holistic understanding of...

The behaviour of pre-code RC columns in sequence of fire and earthquake is not well understood and can be critical in case of buildings which experienced fire and are either unrepaired or poorly repaired when exposed to an earthquake. This study proposes a framework on how to construct a simplified model to assess the post-fire cyclic behaviour of...

Fire spread between informal settlement dwellings (ISD) is a primary concern for large scale informal settlements conflagrations. Globally, approximately one billion people live in informal settlements and are exposed to these fires. This paper presents a fire spread experiment between two dwellings, built with ISO 9705 dimension as an approximatio...

Multiple combined hazards can affect the structures during their live span and may conditionate the future structural behaviour for some types of loading. That is the case of a structure previously damaged by fire and then loaded under seismic loading. For seismic hazard zones it is important assess the seismic performance of existing reinforced co...

Fires in informal settlements are devastating to residents of these precarious urban environments. This paper highlights the use of spatial metrics and wind speed and direction for fire spread risk identification for informal settlement fires in Cape Town. Data on: fire incidents, dwelling footprints, and the wind conditions during a fire, are anal...

The one billion people that currently reside in informal settlements are exposed to a high and daily risk of large conflagrations. With the number of informal settlement dwellers expected to increase in the years to come, more systematic work is needed to better understand these fires. Over the past 3 years to 4 years, researchers have explicitly s...

The propagation of shock waves in confined environments is a complex phenomenon due to the potential for a multiplicity of reflections, diffraction and superposition of waves. The study of such wave propagation effects, which is different from the propagation of shock waves in free-field scenarios, is not entirely described in literature, especiall...

According to recent UN reports, it is estimated that more than one billion people live in informal settlements globally, exposing them to a large potential fire risk. In previous research, it was found that the main fire spread mechanism between dwellings is the external flaming (plume) and radiative heat fluxes from the vertical openings at the dw...

Tomorrow’s Cities is the £20m United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) Urban Disaster Risk Hub. The Hub aims to support the delivery of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and priorities 1 to 3 of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) 2015-2030. We work in four cities: Istanb...

Characterising the risk of the fire spread in informal settlements relies on the ability to understand compartment fires with boundary conditions that are significantly different to normal residential compartments. Informal settlement dwellings frequently have thermally thin and leaky boundaries. Due to the unique design of these compartments, deta...

Approximately one billion people across the globe are living in informal settlements with a large potential fire risk. Due to the high dwelling density, a single informal settlement dwelling fire may result in a very serious fire disaster leaving thousands of people homeless. In this work, a simple physics-based theoretical model was employed to as...

Informal settlements present a challenge for fire safety because they lack the regulation of building standards that have been central to reducing fire risks elsewhere. Rather than being the product of specialist designers (such as architects and engineers), constrained by regulation, informal settlement dwellings are instead predominantly the work...

This study aims to analyze the influence of the fire source location on the hot gas layer temperature in pre-flashover compartment fires. The heat release rate and the ventilation factor influence were also analyzed. A mesh resolution analysis was performed to ensure the quality of numerical results, this analysis included the calculation of the Me...

Large conflagrations of informal settlements occur regularly, leaving thousands of people homeless daily and taking tens of thousands of lives annually. Over the past few years, a large amount of data has been collected from a number of full-scale informal settlement fire experiments. This paper uses that data with a semi-probabilistic fire model p...

This work summarises the key points that can be drawn from the extensive body of literature associated with fire risk indexing methods. A comprehensive definition of fire risk indexing is provided and the sometimes opaque mechanics of indexing are described in detail. Issues arising from fire risk indexing methods are explored, and the variety of t...

One of the largest unknowns in structural fire engineering design is the fire itself, particularly in large internal environments, where real fires have been observed to travel around the floor plate. Several methodologies have been proposed to characterise these fires, most of which rely on the separation of the fire exposure into two so-called fi...

The present paper investigates a travelling fire scenario in an elongated structure (Length 18 m × width 6 m × height 3 m) with a controlled fire source of six trays filled with diesel (width 4 m × length 0.5 m). The fire spread is controlled manually by initiating fires consecutively in the pools. Fire dynamics simulator (FDS) is used to a-priori...

Purpose Globally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon. Design/methodology/...

Thermally-thin compartment fire studies are a reasonable approach to understand fire dynamics in informal settlements, where dwellings built with such materials (e.g. steel sheets) are commonly found. Since the number of people living in informal settlements is growing (currently over 1 billion), fire safety engineering research is of major importa...

Globally, the number of informal settlement dwellings are increasing rapidly; these areas are often associated with numerous large fires. Unfortunately, until recently, very little research has been focused on informal settlement fire issues leaving any attempts to improve their fire safety lacking the evidence base to support effective-decision ma...

Informal settlements are home to approximately one billion people globally and are growing due to rapid urbanisation in less economically developed countries. Their dense layouts, often combined with light, combustible building materials make them highly vulnerable to fires. In some cases fires have spread through hundreds or thousands of homes in...

Approximately one billion people globally live in informal settlements with a large potential fire risk, where a single dwelling fire may result in a very large urban conflagration leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of people homeless. What is not well understood, however, is how fires in informal settlement dwellings develop and spread, and what...

More than 1 billion people are living in informal settlements and refugee camps where houses are commonly built from thermally-thin materials (e.g. steel/asbestos sheets). In fire safety literature there is insufficient attention describing the required conditions for flashover (e.g. Heat Release Rate needed for flashoverQ˙FO) in such compartments....

The risk of fire spread in informal settlements is significant and can be analysed as a function of the spatial arrangement of dwellings. Spatial metrics representing density and shape of dwellings are proposed as a method to identify settlements at high risk of fire spread. LiDAR data is used to map dwelling roofs for informal settlements in the C...

Contemporary structural fire statistics are fundamental in engineering design practice to evaluate likelihood and consequence of fire for different property types, and to investigate how different safety measures impact fire spread. British Standard PD 7974-7:2003 has recently been updated using USA fire statistics; this paper compares PD 7974-7:20...

In South Africa alone, there are more than 5000 informal settlement fires a year, where a single incident can leave up to 10000 people homeless. The government and local authorities of countries with informal settlements, that extend over large areas, have no tools to simulate fires to identify high risk areas, or to quantify the magnitude of an in...

Background: The challenges faced by the Global South during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic are compounded by the presence of informal settlements, which are typically densely populated and lacking in formalized sanitation infrastructure. Social distancing measures in informal settlements may be difficult to implement due to the densit...

UNSTRUCTURED Due to the density of informal settlements, effectively implementing social distancing may be a challenge in informal settlements. This short communication uses dwelling outlines for informal settlements in the City of Cape Town to demonstrate that using a 2 m measure, effective social distancing will be challenging.

Large-scale urban conflagrations in informal settlements are a frequent global event, however there is a lack of experimental research and knowledge within literature on how informal settlements fires spread to support local or national intervention strategies. This paper, therefore, presents results and analysis of a full-scale fire spread experim...

Approximately, one billion people across the globe are currently living in informal shack settlements with a large potential fire risk. Due to the small distance between shacks, a single shack fire may spread and could cause a large area of informal settlement to be burnt in a short period of time. In this work, the critical fire separation distanc...

Informal settlements, which have little or no legal status and no official planning remit, such as slums, shacks and favelas, are exposed to an extensive risk of fire. Due to flammable construction materials of the dwellings, the combustibility and flammability of the materials of dwelling furnishings and the proximity and density of these settleme...

Informal settlement fires occur increasingly in the developing regions and result in a large number of residents dead or homeless in recent years. Inspired by Chinese ancient Ma Tau wall design, a separation wall with small openings and doors is proposed to be built within the informal settlement area to barrier fire spread between dwellings and in...

This paper presents a careful assessment of fire conditions in a long enclosure, open only at one end, which contained a regularly spaced timber crib fire load and was dominated by under-ventilated combustion. Though the geometrical arrangement, with fully enclosed side walls, differs from many more recent "travelling fire" tests, the essential fir...

While fire-related injuries and deaths decreased in the global north over the past few years, they have increased in the global south. With more than one billion people residing in informal settlements (sometimes known as slums, ghettos or shantytowns), it is necessary that greater effort be placed on addressing and developing means for improving f...

Modelling of smoke plumes accurately is computationally expensive/inefficient. In this paper, a simple and novel approach is proposed in order to investigate the ability to represent fire smoke plumes (e.g. from hydrocarbon pool fires) with thermal plumes via the release of hot air. In this approach, the hot air temperature at the source is estimat...

This paper presents a careful assessment of fire conditions in a long enclosure, open only at one end, which contained a regularly spaced timber crib fire load and was dominated by under-ventilated combustion. Though the geometrical arrangement, with fully enclosed side walls, differs from many more recent “travelling fire” tests, the essential fir...

The present paper investigates a travelling fire scenario in an elongated structure (Length 18 m x width 6 m x height 3 m) with a controlled fire source of six pans filled with diesel (width 4 m x length 0.5 m). The fire spread is controlled manually by initiating fires subsequently in the pools. Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is used to a-priori in...

Fire safety engineering is relying more and more on probabilistic risk assessments to understand the individual parameter risks and the combined fault and/or event sequence probabilities to understand the global risk of certain series of events. Contemporary fire statistics of UK and USA are adopted in this research to develop event tree analysis f...

Risk analysis of the built environment is an ever-increasing field within fire safety engineering with many approaches and models now being developed. Therefore, a definition of Fire Risk Indexing is provided and how it is employed as a heuristic solution for the fire risk assessment process; the underlying motivation for developing these indices a...

In post-flashover compartment fires it is advantageous to understand the effect that vertical opening locations have on the heat fluxes experienced from the external fire plumes, where the heat flux from the vertical openings is a potentially crucial parameter to understand the potential risk in urban fire spread. In this paper, a Reduced-scale (40...

Fire brigade response time has substantial consequences not only on life safety but also on property protection. UK fire statistics datasets released by the Home Office from 2010 to 2017 is used to investigate real fire incidents. The analysis examines Dwellings and Other buildings. The response time is classified as presented in the UK fire statis...

Increasing global urbanisation is leading to a rise in the number of people living in informal settlements, challenging our ability to achieve sustainable development goals. As a consequence of high building density, inadequate building methods and flammable building materials, informal settlements are highly vulnerable to the devastating impacts o...

Fires in informal settlements are a major risk facing big cities within the developing countries, not only concerning life safety but also because they exert social and economic pressures on these communities. One of the cities most affected by informal settlement fires is Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. A research project, namely IRIS-Fire,...

Concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) columns can generally be expected to better resist elevated temperatures as compared to unfilled steel hollow sections, whose evaluation after a fire is limited by the resulting deformation. A better understanding of the behaviour of CFST columns after a fire, which is dominated by the maximum temperature achiev...

Probabilistic techniques deal with the randomness of variables and reliability of safety system but their application in fire safety engineering is limited due to the lack of data related to real structures subjected to real fires. This can be overcome by analysis of national fire statistics provided by fire departments. Fire statistics databases a...

Tempered glass is extensively used in modern high-rise buildings. However, in some instances the glass will break and fall out when subjected to a fire which will create a new ventilation condition, drastically changing the enclosure fire dynamics. In this work, eleven tempered glass panels with dimensions of 815 × 815 × 6 mm³ were heated by a pool...

Tempered glass is a safety glass required by fire codes for use in building façade systems. However, as previous studies were primarily focused on the ordinary float glass, little is known about the fire performance of tempered glass panels and the interaction between its fallout and enclosure fire dynamics. In this study, eight small-scale experim...

Concrete filled steel tubular (CFST) columns have a high probability to resist high temperatures compared to steel structures, whose evaluation after a fire is limited by the resulting deformation. A better understanding of the behaviour of CFST columns after a fire, affected by the maximum temperature achieved by the concrete infill, is required t...

This report is a summary of the Tisova fire test, conducted in the Czech Republicin January 2015. It is the first of two reports into these test, and describes thebuilding, the experimental setup and discusses the results obtained on the day ofthe test. The results are discussed with a specific focus on the travelling nature ofthe fire in the build...

Fires can cause substantial damage to structures, both non-structural and structural, with economic losses of almost 1% GDP in developed countries. Whilst design codes allow engineers to design for the primary design driver, property protection is rarely, if ever, designed for. Quantification and design around property protection has been used for...

Reliability based methods are at the core of Eurocode structural design. Partial load factors, combined with material safety factors, are derived from First Order Reliability Methods (FORM) with the intention of ensuring that structural elements or sub-frame assemblies have an appropriately low probability of failure. The acceptable probability of...

National fire statistic databases provide the opportunity to assess the response of real fires in real structures. Different countries have developed their own databases using on-line forms completed after an event by fire departments. Common mandatory fields include response times, area of damage, size of fire at arrival and after extinguishment....

The optimization of structures for fire is a growing area of research and practice, however much of the optimization is conducted with respect to life safety and not with property damage. Resilience optimization of structures for fire events represents an evolution from pure life safety objectives. Fire statistics provide information that can fill...

Fig. 1. Fragility curve for a hypothetical 4-state damage scale ranging from no damage to structural collapse.

Natural or human-made hazards may occur at any time. Although one might assume that individuals plan in advance for such potentially damaging events, the existing literature indicates that most communities remain inadequately prepared. In the past, research in this area has focused on identifying the most effective ways to communicate r