Inside the Canadian Lab Burning Down Buildings to Save Them
Ahmed Kashef burns things down for a living. As the director of the fire safety testing facility at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, Dr. Kashef leads a team of scientists, engineers and technicians who operate an array of furnaces, construct buildings and then light them on fire to test the resilience of their materials.
When I visited the lab recently, Dr. Kashef told me that the growing threat of wildfires transformed his work. “Usually the fire that we dealt with all the time was from the inside to the outside,” he said at the start of our tour. “Now the wind is a factor. The size of the fire is much bigger because it’s coming from the forest. And then it comes through the firebrand, which is the projection of hot and burned material attacking the building.” He added: “You’re attacking the outside, not from the inside. So all that has changed the way that you need to treat buildings.” Walking into the lab on the research council’s university-style campus feels like a return to the Diefenbaker era. A brass plaque acknowledges its 1958 opening; a shinier one in French was added sometime after bilingualism became official. Just beyond the entrance, a small museum displays obsolete instruments and photographs of researchers burning down houses on government land. The three full-scale furnaces also date from the building’s opening but nevertheless are imposing. The first one visitors encounter can hold a wall up to 10 feet high and 12 feet wide. Behind it is a furnace for floors and roofs. In another room, a third tests columns.
They do more than spew flames. Safety codes require that building materials sustain specific loads for certain periods before collapsing in a fire. The furnaces were recently upgraded to test the new laminated wood beams that Canada’s forest industry promoted as an alterative to steel and aluminum for tall buildings. Using hydraulics, the wall furnace can now simulate the load of up to a 30-story building. The furnaces also now generate greater heat to replicate the conditions of an approaching wildfire. Steel and concrete columns also go under the torch. And the results are not always what one may expect. The laminated wood beams and columns maintain their structural integrity, Dr. Kashef explained, by slowly burning layer by layer. Concrete beams, by contrast, can explode as the steel reinforcing bars inside them expand and moisture in their concrete turns to superheated steam. The lab is also developing ways to simulate the wind-borne embers — firebrands — that set homes and other buildings ablaze well before the actual fire front arrives.
A small prototype device nicknamed “the baby dragon” swallows wood chips at one end and spews a stream of embers out the other. The plan is to scale it into a full-size version modeled after one at Japan’s national fire safety lab. Elsewhere in the building, an even smaller ember maker attacks hot-plate-size samples of manufactured wood products. Because the lab cannot burn down forests, it is also developing gas and other sensors that a drone can drop into real fires to collect data for analysis. Not all the work involves burning. Other parts of the lab use virtual-reality driving simulators to improve wildfire evacuations, and are developing air filters for hospitals that screen out particles specific to wildfire smoke.
The increased focus on wildfire safety is producing new approaches. Dr. Kashef showed me samples of wood treated with a coating that leaves the surface appearing unpainted — a popular look for homes and cabins in areas prone to wildfires. When exposed to flames, the coating immediately puffs up into a protective layer of insulation that vaguely resembles chocolate cake. Active WildfiresThis week, two rapidly growing wildfires in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon have prompted evacuations, burned buildings and disrupted highways, railways and the electrical system. A forecast for hot and dry weather suggests that they will continue to expand in the coming days. As this year’s wildfire season develops in Canada, you can find The New York Times’s coverage here. The federal government also regularly updates its national wildfire map. Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. The Gordie Howe Bridge will finally open
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