9 minute read
Meet the Speaker: Jessica Barton
We ordinarily design buildings to ensure people can get out when they need to, but what about when getting out isn’t an option? It’s a question, says Jessica Barton, Fire Safety Consultant/Engineer, Bloom Fire Consulting, that requires a mind shift. Interview by Nicholas Dynon.
Jessica Barton graduated from her master’s degree in 2020 from The University of Queensland, completing her thesis on the topic of fire-fighter fatalities in wildland fire settings. Since then, her work has seen her solving design issues from the furnace of wildfires to the freezer of Antarctica.
Among Jessica’s most notable works is the upgrade and redevelopment of multiple Antarctic research stations as part of Australia’s Antarctic Infrastructure Renewal Program (AIRP). It’s a project that involved significant design complexity and innovation given the extreme environmental conditions and the challenges of international design team collaboration.
In addition to her commercial work, Jessica has been heavily involved in raising awareness around the fire engineering design of buildings within wildland and bushfire settings, and this is a topic that dominated our interview:
ND: I’d be really interested to understand what led you to fire safety in the first place.
JB: For a long period of time I wanted to become an engineer, but didn’t know exactly what type of engineering to go into. So when I went into university, it was a natural process of reduction. I definitely didn’t like mechanical, and definitely didn’t like electrical. I kind of fell into civil, and that was the original path that I was heading down.
I then did a research-based course at the end of my first year, and we had to do some volunteer work at one of the labs around the university. We were given a list of different options, and one of them was the Fire Lab. I thought, they’re burning some stuff… that’s quite interesting!
At that time, they were conducting an experiment burning Christmas trees to assess the impact of that on the risk to people in their homes at Christmas time, and I thought that seemed quite interesting. I worked in that lab as part of my course, and that was where I found my interest for fire engineering.
Before that, I’d never actually heard of fire engineering. I didn’t know it existed. And I think that’s a common thing. But that experience is what sparked my interest in the field - pun intended!
After doing a few elective courses throughout my second and third years, I decided that I would switch over to an integrated Bachelor and Master’s degree, and that’s how I managed to finish my degree in five years rather than six.
ND: How did you arrive at your thesis topic?
JB: When I was thinking about topics, I was thinking that I really like the idea of not-for-profit organisations helping out people who are not so fortunate in the sense that they don’t have the level of safety that we have when we go into a building. It actually originally stemmed from a conversation I had with a person that I was working with where we were essentially saying that fires in informal settlements, or slums, would be something that would be really worthwhile looking into.
And after we broke down the topic and did a little bit of research, we realised, wow, this is a much bigger thing than we can fit into one thesis. So we focused on one aspect. And it was in the research, essentially, that people were describing these fires as being very similar to bushfires or wildland fires. And so we thought, okay, we’ll take that aspect of it and see if we can better understand that first before we can apply that knowledge to this type of settlement.
So basically, I was looking at what scenarios we have had firefighter fatalities occur, particularly in the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires in Australia. And in looking at what happened in the scenario, what was the probable causation for it, what were the other impacting factors, and what could we have done differently to potentially limit the risk for that happening?
Part of that outcome was that there are parts of the fire landscape that we still just don’t understand, and that we’re continually having to work at to understand how to respond to those circumstances. But also that there are still so many shortfalls currently within our industry that are within our realm of our ability to address.
In Australia, for example, we have different brigade organisations in different states, and often also have separate entities for volunteer firefighters, as opposed to permanent, paid firefighters. As a result, there is inequality in access to training and resources.
In the 2019-2020 bushfires, we had a mixture of volunteers and permanent firefighters mixed together with firefighters from different countries, including New Zealand and Canada. So it was a mix of people of different backgrounds, different training, and differing levels of knowledge of how to respond to these fires. And then, of course, across the states there were different protocols.
As an example, between different states there are different ways that fire fighters mark trees that are potentially dangerous versus trees marked as habitat for local native animals (koalas, etc). The way of marking what is called a ‘killer tree’, which is a tree that’s at risk of falling and hurting someone, can look the same in one state as the marking for a tree marked as a koala habitat in another state.
So there’s not only that kind of confusion, but also the fact that, during the Black Summer fires, firefighters were having to manage extremely long and repetitive back-to-back shifts, and they’re sleeping out in their trucks, so fatigue becomes a factor. How can you expect people to be operating at their best after such long hours responding to a fire?
ND: What sort of reception are you getting in relation to your research outcomes?
JB: A lot of what my presentation focuses on is the Australian code. One of the fire events I focus on occurred during the 2019-2020 bushfires in which one of the fires was potentially about to impact on an aged care facility that accommodated a number of residents in high needs care that were at relatively high risk.
The fire had been lit by arson in the bushland adjacent to this aged care facility, and the conditions were quite extreme that day. Such circumstances can make it much more difficult to have the time to evacuate people.
They were fortunate enough that day that the fire was blown in another direction. But what if it hadn’t? What if that fire had continued to drive straight toward that aged care facility? What could we be doing to make sure that if people can’t get out, that they’re still going to be safe in that type of environment?
So my research was specifically looking at vulnerable people and the question of how do we address the evacuation of these people when we’re potentially in a dire situation where they can’t get out?
The Australian code, has now brought in some new requirements around the need to design buildings to be able to shelter people during a bushfire in aged care and other facilities. But what we’re seeing is a reluctance to take on these new provisions and, in some instances, measures being taken to move the building so that they no longer fall within those requirements and therefore don’t have to address them.
We’re basically seeing complete avoidance, which I’m not sure is a better option. I mean, the building’s a bit further away, it’s a little bit safer, but is that really in line with the original intent to be able to shield occupants?
So my presentation is more directed around the challenges for us as engineers in implementing these requirements, because they’re quite stringent, in some cases they’re quite onerous, and they’re something that we’ve never really done before.
Despite bushfires being a really big thing in Australia, there’s not really any formal education around the fire safety engineering of buildings in bushfire prone areas. And because of that, there’s a lack of knowledge all the way from students to professionals. We don’t really have any guides on shielding occupants in these types of structures, because the only other precedent we’ve had before now is the design of Neighbourhood Safer Places and private bushfire shelters, which are quite different in nature to these more vulnerable structures.
Essentially, the primary reason that regulation was originally introduced around the design of these shelters was because in 2009, in Victoria, we had a very severe fire season, which resulted in a Royal Commission. The response to the Royal Commission highlighted the need for properly designed and regulated shelters because it was made evident that people were attempting to shelter in buildings unfit for this purpose, at times resulting in fatalities. Because of the lack of domestic and international legislation on these types of structures, it was also difficult however, to specify what the benchmark should be for their performance. Currently the National Construction Code has specified the requirements for regulated vulnerable structures based on the same methodology used to design private bushfire shelters and community last resort shelters.
But in reality, there’s a bit of a disconnect between private bushfire shelters and these more vulnerable building types which makes it difficult to translate the designs directly across. For example, designing a structure that houses many people who are potentially disabled and/or have cardiovascular and respiratory issues is not the same as designing a private bushfire shelter for healthy and generally able-bodied people.
What are the steps we might take to then to merge this gap? What considerations do we need to make that are potentially different to the way we would usually design a building – because usually you’re designing a building to get people out, whereas in this circumstance we’re designing the building to keep them in.
So it’s about how do we maintain the building envelope? How do we make sure that the occupants don’t get overheated inside the building? How do we maintain breathability of the air? It’s almost involves a whole mind shift, and it’s ultimately this type of challenge that drew me into engineering.
