Fire Safety Engineering the Unknown: The Race Between Safety and Novelty - Wojciech Wegrzynski

Wojciech Wegrzynski (Building Research Institute (ITB) Poland) tracks back the history of recent innovations in the built environment – ventilated facades, EVs, and other e-mobility devices and tries to understand how they have passed through the radar of fire safety engineers. Why do all of a sudden we have the discussion that we maybe have an issue, and why it was not picked up by the industry before? Or maybe we could not have picked it up? The same arguments are brought up for emerging technologies, including mass timber, photovoltaics and green facades. Wegrzynski hopes to pinpoint the weak points of our regulatory/testing/enforcement systems that make us vulnerable to unknown challenges brought up by the developments of the modern world.