In the afternoon of March 23, 2006 a Providence firefighter was diagnosed as having cyanide poisoning after working at a building fire. In the aftermath of three fires at commercial and residential sites that day, eight additional firefighters (out of 28 tested) were found to have elevated levels of cyanide. Numerous other members reported symptoms consistent with cyanide poisoning, including h...

Fire accidents are a significant risk to human life and civil infrastructure. As countermeasure, the regulatory bodies of different countries have established standards for evaluating performance construction elements during fire exposure. ISO 834 is globally accepted fire-resistance testing standard. Other include ASTM E119, BS 476, IS 3809, JIS A 1304, AS 1503, EN 1363, GB/T 9978, which utili...

The initial material cost of structural stainless steel is about four times that of structural carbon steel, due largely to the expense of the alloying elements and the relatively low volume of production. Given broadly similar structural performance, additional areas of benefit need to be identified and exploited in order to establish stainless steel as a viable alternative material for constr...

California's foothill counties are the scene of rapid development. All types of construction in former wildlands is creating an intermix of wildland-structures-wildland that is different from the traditional "urban-wildland interface." The fire and structural environment for seven counties is described. Fire statistics are compared with growth patterns from 1970 to 1985. Potentials for the year...

With global warming, the increasing forest fires have caused trips and outages frequently along transmission lines, which is a serious threat to the operation stability of power grids. Impact factors on transmission line fires are numerous and the current risk assessment methods could hardly handle the complex nonlinear relationship between risks and factors, therefore, a method based on BP neu...