MASS TIMBER FIRE TESTING

As a key part of the highly successful International Code Council’s Tall Wood Building Committee work, Susan Jones helped write the ICC Fire Test Protocols as part of the Fire Test Committee. Five fire tests were designed to test the capacity of mass timber to withstand and restrain compartment fires in real-life fire conditions. The tests were conducted at the national Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire Arms facility (ATF) outside of Washington D.C. in the summer of 2017. All tests met or exceeded modeling expectations. The highly successful results formed the basis of the rationale and performance criteria for the Tall Wood Building Codes, later ratified in early 2019.

The 2017 ATF fire tests, while conservative in their both their testing protocols, the facility limitations, and in the way they were interpreted into code regulated language, did lay the important groundwork for historic code changes, based on a scientific, data-based process of understanding fire performance in real life. The final test report results of the 2017 tests were published in 2018 by the US Forest Service, and can be found here. They and others later, such as the 2020 RISE test, became the basis for new national regulation for tall timber code changes in both 2019 and in 2022.

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In 2019 Susan spoke to both the New York Fire Department and the Tokyo Fire Departments on the emerging Mass Timber buildings in the United States and their safety to help educate and extend national and global acceptance for the new emerging lower-carbon Tall Timber building type. The ICC codes were adopted up to 85’ in New York City in the fall of 2021, after a thorough vetting and educational process by stakeholders paving the way for new, lower-carbon tall buildings throughout the US.

Continuing atelierjones’ national leadership in helping to develop protocols to test the fire/life safety reliability of mass timber, in 2019-2021 atelierjones collaborated with the USFS, the American Wood Council, the RISE Institute of Sweden and multiple sponsors, to help develop five fire tests, performed in Sweden in the fall of 2020. Testing compartment fire tests, built from structural mass timber, with two sets of openings, some more open to emulate office buildings, some less open to emulate residential units, four out of five tests outperformed the predictive series of rigorous modelling efforts. Real-life conditions were built to test the ability of mass timber to contain the fire within a compartment during a fire sustained for four hours, without sprinkler or fire department intervention. The Final Report, issued in February 2021 is available on the RISE website.

2016-2021

Susan Jones

COLLABORATORS

International Code Council

American Wood Council

USDA Forest Service

Research Institute of Sweden, RISE

United States Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms