Code Consulting/Peer Review
Effective Solutions for Commercial & Industrial Structures
At Reax Engineering, our team of expert fire protection engineers designs fire protection systems through an integrated approach to help protect buildings and the occupants during a fire. Our building and fire code consulting services are designed to fit the needs of building architects, developers, and owners to meet today's fire safety and environmental code requirements.
Building and fire codes standards require special attention for keeping occupants safe, protecting your assets, and code compliance. Our team of fire experts can help evaluate and provide a custom solution for your project's unique risks and needs. We can work with you throughout the project from the preliminary design to single building or fire code issues.
Design of Smoke Control Systems
Keep your building occupants safe from smoke during unwanted fires. We can design smoke control and fire alarm systems that account for any common issues, such as dormancy, inoperability, unreliability, or failure to meet intended fire safety design criteria.
Structural Fire Engineering & Fire Testing
As structural engineers, we take an innovative approach to structural fire safety and engineering with the ultimate goal to reduce human and economic loss from fire. Identifying relevant fire tests and conducting fire testing provide the solution to that important goal.
Fire Modeling for Building Design
Through computer fire modeling for building design, we have the ability to analyze fire and life safety in your building—all while having the capability to predict fire growth, fire behavior, analyze smoke control systems, provide a post-fire timeline of events, and more.
Expert Testimony
Our fire scientists follow all guidelines and standards and exhaust all measures to determine the fire origin and cause. Our goal is to provide the facts of the investigation with integrity and professionalism. One of our founding partners, Dr. Rich is a testifying expert providing scientific support to issues of fire cause and origin, construction defect, code compliance, and fire toxicity. He is active in code development processes through membership in IEC TC 89 (Fire Hazard Testing), and TC 108 (Safety of Electronic Equipment) and ASTM E05 (Fire Standards).
Fire Modeling for Building Design
Through computer fire modeling for building design, we have the ability to analyze fire and life safety in your building—all while having the capability to predict fire growth, fire behavior, analyze smoke control systems, provide a post-fire timeline of events, and more.
Failure Failure Comprehensive Analysis
Through the failure analysis process of forensic scene investigations, we'll collect and analyze various data through laboratory testing, calculations, and computer modeling to determine the cause of a failure and help determine or support any corrective actions or liability.
Fire Origin & Cause Analysis
With life and property at stake, the cause of fire or explosion must be thoroughly investigated. Our fire investigation experts can conduct and manage complex investigations to guide the process from site inspection to the courtroom.
Forensics
Reax Engineering investigates fire origin and cause and has provided engineering support for hundreds of fire investigations through fire testing and modelling, electrical and mechanical failure analysis, construction defect, and code compliance evaluation.
We have investigated and analyzed many of the nation’s most serious and costly fires and explosions involving high rise, factory, commercial, residential, wildland, aircraft, motorcycle, and automotive losses. Our team is experienced with Rule 26 reporting, deposition, and courtroom testimony and presentations.
James (Jamie) Lord, PE, CFI is a former firefighter with degrees in Mechanical and Fire Protection Engineering. His 18 years of experience in fire protection engineering is notable for 10 years of experience investigating fires, performing forensic engineering analyses and serving as an expert witness for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, participating in hundreds of investigations and providing expert testimony in both U.S. and Canadian courts and training programs worldwide.
David Rich has a PhD in Fire Science with an emphasis in fire testing and fire behavior analysis. He is a former Rescue Captain with the San Francisco Fire Department with certifications in Hazardous Materials First Responder and DHS Disaster Management. He is a lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and has taught Fire Test Methods in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s graduate program in Fire Protection Engineering. He is a fire expert with 12 years of experience participating in investigations, conducting reconstructions, and providing forensic scientific testing and support for determination of cause and origin.
Professor Carlos Fernandez Pello is a tenured faculty of Mechanical Engineering in UC Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is a world recognized fire expert and combustion science with 30 years of experience investigating fires and developing experimental test programs to assess ignition and fire spread behavior. He is an expert in fire dynamics, combustion science, fire behavior, ignition by sparks from powerlines, wildland fire ignition and fire spread, and polymer flammability.
Origin and Cause Investigation
Fire investigation is the process of determining the origin, cause, and development of a fire or explosion.
With life and property at stake, the cause of fire or explosion must be thoroughly investigated. Our fire investigation experts can conduct and manage complex investigations to guide the process from site inspection to the courtroom.
We have investigated and analyzed many of the nation’s most serious and costly fires and explosions involving, high rise, factory, commercial, residential, wildland, aircraft, motorcycle, and automotive losses. Our team is experienced with Rule 26 reporting, deposition, and courtroom testimony and presentations.
Fire Testing and Design
Fire testing is an integral component of building and consumer product regulations in the United States. Essentially, a fire test involves exposure of a material, product, or assembly to a particular ignition source or thermal insult. Pass/fail criteria are then established based on flame spread rate or distance, heat release rate, temperature, etc.
A large number of fire tests are used in the United States and a commonly asked question is "Does this material/product comply with the relevant fire or flammability test?" We can identify what that relevant fire test is, and then conduct fire testing to answer that important question. For example, in buildings, hourly fire resistance is determined by ASTM E119, "Standard Test Methods for Fire Tests of Building Construction and Materials"; flammability ratings of wall and ceiling linings are determined in accordance with ASTM E84, "Standard Test Method for Surface Burning Characteristics of Building Materials"; flammability of textiles and films is determined in accordance with NFPA 701, "Standard Methods of Fire Tests for Flame Propagation of Textiles and Films". Motor vehicle interiors are tested per Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 302 (FMVSS 302). The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) promulgates fire testing standards for mattress flammability (16 CFR Part 1633), flammability of clothing/general wearing apparel (16 CFR Part 1610) and children's sleepwear (16 CFR Part 1615/1616). Even NASA has its own fire test (NASA Standard 6001, Test 1 + 2).
In addition to providing answers to regulatory questions, fire testing can also be an important aspect of forensic fire analysis and reconstruction. There are two primary categories of fire testing or flammability testing relevant to fire safety "bench-scale" fire tests and "real scale" fire tests.
A bench-scale fire test is conducted on a laboratory bench. Bench-scale fire tests are relatively inexpensive and usually require a short lead time. One of the most widely used bench-scale fire tests is the Cone Calorimeter (ASTM E1354) where a 4 inch by 4-inch material sample is heated and burned, and its combustion products are collected and analyzed. This fire test produces Cone Calorimeter "curves" of heat release rate, smoke production rate, and other quantities that provide insight into a material's overall flammability. However, interpretation of these curves is not straightforward and requires expertise in combustion and flammability.
Cone Calorimeter (or similar fire test) data can also be used to estimate "material properties" of combustible solids, which are required by pyrolysis models to characterize a material's overall reaction to fire. These material properties serve as input to fire growth simulations that analyze how fires develop and spread by allowing computer fire models to calculate how solid combustibles ignite and burn. There are no standardized (or even widely-recognized) procedures for material property estimation, but Reax Engineering personnel are leading experts in this developing application of fire testing.
In comparison to bench-scale fire tests, which require only small-scale material samples, real scale fire testing involves burning full-size objects or mockups. By placing a burning item under a large hood that is instrumented with sensors (sometimes called a furniture calorimeter) the amount of heat and smoke that a burning fuel package produces can be directly determined. This information can then be provided as input to a computer fire model to help establish the fire timeline. Compared with bench-scale fire testing, a real scale fire test is more expensive and usually has a longer lead time; however, it can provide a wealth of information regarding large-scale fire behavior.
Often, bench scale fire testing is used to develop a set of material properties that make it possible to simulate large-scale fire growth, and then real-scale fire testing is used to "calibrate" the fire model.
Wildland Fire
Historically, around 10 million acres are charred by wildland fires each year in the United States. The October 2007 firestorm in Southern California destroyed around 1,500 homes and resulted in 9 deaths, consuming over 500,000 acres. In 2008, almost 1.4 million acres were lost to California wildfires. 2012 acreage burned includes 1.5 million acres in Idaho, 1.3 million in Oregon, and over 800,000 in California. The causes of wildland fires are numerous: lightning, carelessly discarded smoking materials, campfires, fireworks, conductor clashing or interaction of overhead electrical utilities with vegetation, motor vehicles, hot work/welding, and arson.
Wildland and Wildland Urban Interface fire risk modeling and mapping.
In 2010, Reax Engineering was retained by AT&T, Verizon, Cox Communications, and other members of the California Communication Infrastructure Provider (CIP) Coalition to develop a wildland fire risk model to quantify the fire hazard associated with CIP facilities that are co-located with overhead electrical utilities (power lines). High-resolution wind and weather modeling of historical severe fire weather events, combined with statewide rasters of fuel and topography data, were provided as input to a wildland fire spread model that was developed specifically for this project and used to identify areas of California at elevated risk of experiencing catastrophic wildland fires. 
This "CIP Fire Threat Map", sometimes called the "Reax Map", was presented to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and accepted on an interim basis for CIPs to identify high fire risk areas. Since that time, Reax Engineering has been retained by a major electrical utility to develop a wildland fire model for simulating rapidly-spreading wind-driven fires that historically have led to large losses in Wildland Urban Interface areas. This model is used to identify areas at elevated risk of experiencing catastrophic wildland fires ignited by overhead electrical utilities.
Wildland fire modeling
Wildland fire modeling tools are available to analyze surface fire spread and fire spotting. Such tools provide valuable information regarding fire development, and can be used to answer "what if" questions related to fire development and spread, effectiveness of fuels treatments, effect of wind and weather on fire propagation, etc. In forensic investigation of wildland fires, wildland fire modeling tools can be used as part of the hypothesis testing guidance of NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations, to assess whether or not a postulated specific origin area is consistent with observed fire patterns. One of the outputs of wildland fire modeling is a spatial and temporal description of the fire front, an example of which is shown below:
Wind and weather analysis and modeling.
In some (but not all) cases, topography can affect wind patterns and subsequent fire development. Wind and weather data can be obtained from Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS), as well as gridded data products produced by various meteorological organizations, such as the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) dataset. Local wind and weather patterns at the time of a fire can be recreated using tools such as the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) models, both of which are used at Reax Engineering on a regular basis.
