Burning Question

Choking smoke from a fire in a half-finished apartment building blanketed the University of Maryland in April, neatly illustrating some of the core research topics of José Torero, a world-renowned fire-safety expert with a particular interest in blazes in tall buildings who had recently returned to campus.

Torero taught in College Park from 1995 to 2001 before leaving to pursue research opportunities at universities in Scotland and Australia. Among them, the Peruvian professor set alight an abandoned high-rise in Glasgow to increase knowledge of how fires engulf buildings, and participated in forensic investigations ranging from West Virginia’s Sago Mine disaster to building collapses following the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

This year, he accepted joint appointments as the John L. Bryan Chair in Fire Protection Engineering and director of the Center for Disaster Resilience. And he’s been tapped to work on an inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed more than 70 people in June.

Torero’s basic message: In a time of great technological advances, builders and regulators must focus on safety as much as on efficiency and innovation. He recently sat down with Terp to discuss his global career in fire engineering.—Chris Carroll

What did you do after leaving UMD?

After Montblanc [a 1999 tunnel fire in Europe that killed 38 people], I became interested in the interaction between structural engineering and fire engineering. I was communicating with people at the University of Edinburgh, where they had just analyzed a very large-scale experiment that showed that in some cases, structures have a much greater capacity to survive fire than we expected, but it also exposed vulnerabilities that we had not perceived before. I thought this was the future of fire engineering, and so I agreed to develop a structural fire engineering program there. I arrived at the end of August 2001. A week or two later was Sept. 11, and structures became the focal point of fire engineering for the next decade.

You helped investigate skyscraper fires resulting from that attack. What should people know about tall buildings?

The construction industry has changed a lot in the last 10 or 15 years—a lot more optimized, more prefabricated, a lot more cost-conscious and with new technologies to speed up the pace of construction. You’re completely done with the first floor before you’ve even finished building the top floor. You’re putting on the facade system while you’re still putting the structure in place. So you get more construction site fires and complexity introduces new and undetected vulnerabilities. This work with tall buildings led me to the core part of my work: how the construction industry has embedded this new layer of complexity, and how we have not fully digested the safety implications.

So should we be scared of tall buildings?

No, tall buildings do not fall every day because of fires. In general, they are perfectly safe. Innovation is just creating new challenges. For example, a part that is really interesting is the management of the construction site, because now you have 25 things going on at the same time, and you’ve moved in all the furniture, the packaging and everything. So there’s this enormous amount of fuel in the building without the integrity of the safety systems in place.

What are some of your notable fire experiments?

Large-scale experiments in fire basically stopped in the 1970s, when people started believing that we had all the research tools. It was only in the 2000s that it became absolutely evident that with modern computational tools, we needed different experiments. So we ran one in Edinburgh that was the most highly sensor-driven experiment that had ever been done up to that time. And then we repeated it with 12 more experiments in a large facility with fires that were 10 times bigger, and they had sensors of a density consistent with the most sophisticated computational fluid dynamics models. Eventually we ran a final validation test, taking a large warehouse in Portugal and setting up a very, very large fire in a real building. Again, getting measurements at a level of density and quality above anything that had existed … More recently we’ve done a number of experiments specific to novel timber construction processes.

What brought you back to UMD?

I came back to work in the Center for Disaster Resilience [in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering] and try to integrate fire safety into a much more comprehensive vision of resilience than I have been working with up to now. That implies me understanding other forms of hazards—working with people studying hurricanes, floods and so forth, and trying to bring in my knowledge and apply it to a much more comprehensive multi-hazard vision of resilience.

What’s your role in the Grenfell Tower fire investigation?

In the United Kingdom, they have a process called the public inquiry—basically, a very senior judge is called on by the government to study the problem ahead of any other litigation. It’s a completely impartial, non-litigious analysis of the problem where a group of experts gets together, analyzes the problem, produces reports and testifies on those reports. The judge will use all that information in a final report. So I’m one of those experts, and my job is to amalgamate the reports from all the experts to build the full story, from a technical standpoint, of how a little fire ended up with the deaths of all these people. 

What’s the biggest misconception the public has about fire safety?

Fire is like sports, in that people sit in front of the TV thinking that they know better than the coach and the players. The misconception is its complexity; it is truly a specialized field where, most likely, common sense will only lead to an oversimplification of the problem.