A new draft report released for public comment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a comprehensive set of “best practice” guidelines for designing building structures to resist major fires. The document, NISTIR 7563, Best Practice Guidelines for Structural Fire Resistance of Concrete and Steel Buildings, is part of the NIST response to the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, and was developed in conjunction with the agency’s technical building and fire safety investigation of WTC buildings 1 and 2 (the WTC towers) and 7.

NIST welcomes public comments on the draft report, received by noon Eastern Daylight Time on April 15, 2009.  Comments may be submitted by one of the following three methods:

electronic mail to cauffman@nist.gov;
fax to (301) 869-6275; or
mail to NISTIR 7563 Comments, Attn: Stephen Cauffman, NIST, 100 Bureau Dr., Stop 8611, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-8611.

The draft report is available here as a PDF file:  http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NISTIR_7563_DRAFT_Feb2009.pdf.

This draft guidelines report is the result of a collaborative effort initiated by NIST that involved experts in the design and construction industry and academia. It features information on current best practices in structural fire resistance engineering in the United States and overseas, and current best knowledge in fire risk assessment, and characterization of the design fire, material properties at high temperatures, and thermal and structural response calculation methods. The document integrates state-of-the-art information in one source, enabling users to apply a performance-based approach to fire resistance design as well as the evaluation of concrete and steel structures.

For more information, contact wtc@nist.gov.

Fears about the structural integrity of a burned-out six-story office building in which three people perished are keeping firefighters from entering today to see if any more victims remain in the ruins, officials said today.

While there were no reports of anyone missing, the firefighters were waiting for an engineer to give the green light to enter the building again. Its not clear in the article what’s keeping the engineers from making their evaluatlion. I assume they’re waiting for the fire to be put out, after which they could assess if the building is dangerous. Only after this assessment could the firefighters enter the building, room by room, to complete their search for victims.

This got me thinking about a FEMA-sponsored seminar on ATC-20, for rapid post-earthquake safety evaluations of buildings, that I attended a couple years ago. The idea was to equip engineers with a framework to do effective structural evaluations quickly following a disaster. While this fire wasn’t a widespread disaster, it highlights the role of structural engineers in the recovery, following an accident or disaster. For engineers who aren’t building inspectors everyday, but spend most of their time in a design setting, I think the ATC-20 course could be useful.