An interview with urban fire safety expert Phil Murphy
August 5th 2020. Melissa Sterry
At a time when many an architect is positing the possibility of creating timber tower blocks and ‘vertical forests’, urban fire safety expert Phil Murphy illuminates the risks of using combustible materials in high-rise buildings…
MS: A fire safety management consultant, describe your day-to-day responsibilities.
PM: Most of my work is strategic, with organisations that have fire safety management responsibility for numerous tall residential buildings. Although I tend to interact mostly with clients that are at at the top end of organisations my work does still, invariably, include visiting and examining buildings.
MS: Briefly describe how you gained the knowledge and experience to navigate the complexity of fire behaviour in tall buildings, and in the wider built environment.
PM: I became a firefighter with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service in my twenties and my first station was one of the busiest in Europe at that time; Moss Side fire station. Big parts of the station area were dominated by large housing estates consisting of low, medium and high-rise flats. I studied Fire Engineering through the Institution of Fire Engineers in my spare time and eventually won promotions and subsequently a place on a Fire Safety Officer qualification course at Moreton-in-Marsh, it was a lengthy and in-depth course back then. At the time the UK was moving from the old fire safety regulations under which every building would have a Fire Certificate issued by the Fire Service, to the current one under the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order (2005) which introduced self-management of fire safety through periodic inspections, better known as Fire Risk Assessments (FRAs). For the last ten years, after having left the service, I’ve worked with commercial property managers and owners to keep their portfolios of variously used tall, unusual and complex buildings compliant and fire safe. In respect of fire risk, the life and death decisions have mostly already been made by the designers, constructors, occupiers and managers of the buildings I see. My work lies in analysis of what they have done or are doing and how fire-safe the building is, and can be, in light of those factors.
MS: Casting your mind back to prior to the Grenfell Tower fire, how visible would you say the potential risks of encasing tall buildings in combustible materials was, be they in cladding or otherwise?
PM: Highly. There had been dozens of fires around the world in which combustible elements of external wall systems had played a significant part. In the UK we have been having such high-rise fires since the one at Knowsley Heights, Liverpool, in 1991.
MS: Thinking beyond combustible cladding, how visible would you say that the more general risks of fire in tall buildings was in the period to June 2017?
PM: Very visible, to a trained eye the decline in standards over the years was evident. The building fire safety crisis that is currently unfolding in the UK relates to serious fire safety issues throughout buildings, not just the outer walls.
MS: Thinking to the Grenfell Tower fire’s aftermath, and to the UK government’s response to the event, and to the risks it’s highlighted, what are your thoughts?
PM: To say ‘disappointing’ would be an understatement. A small number of people in a small room will never match the solution-forming capability of a larger room with a larger and more varied range of people in it. When high level discussions include a more diverse range of knowledgeable people, they will make far smarter decisions and a more productive and intelligence-formed direction will come from them.
Beyond expertise, comes empathy and relatability to the issue. I have, over the years, lived in three different tower blocks. In June 2017 I watched the horrific scenes of the fire at Grenfell Tower (aftermath pictured below) unfold on my TV, in my flat, in a fifty year old 24-storey single staircase tower block. I feel having that lived experience sometimes gives me a helpfully realistic perspective that is lacking amongst senior decision makers.
MS: Regarding fire safety in tall buildings more generally, would you say that it’s accurate to state that current UK fire building regulations fragment decision-making among communities of practice of whom it may or may not be the technical expertise to understand the impacts of their decisions?
PM: Absolutely. The design, construction and management of tall buildings has become an exercise in which supply chain management and contractual avoidance of legal liability are uppermost priorities. Safe design and good building management have both taken a back seat. We’re now seeing the truly astronomical financial cost of that and of having not managed the associated risks accordingly.
MS: The matter that literally hundreds of tower blocks, both private and public, residential and commercial, are clad in highly combustible insulation materials is well-documented. But, what fire risks in tall buildings are not so visible, yet should be and why?
PM: Windows, concealed cavities, and service risers. The debate around the suitability of various materials for windows in residential tall buildings has been going on for years and remains unresolved.
Concealed cavities frequently come about as a result of major refurbishment projects, something that has been happening a lot to our older tall buildings in recent years. Historic problems related to damp, for example, have been solved by installing ventilation without paying due attention to the devastating impact it can have on fire separation and the spread of fire, smoke and toxic products of combustion. In many cases the issue was compounded further by encasing those mistakes inside cavities made from flammable materials (such as plywood) that make thorough inspections difficult, time consuming and expensive.
Service risers that are only accessed by going into dwellings and are inaccessible from common areas, in particular, have been largely neglected. There are thousands of blocks with full height protected service risers that haven’t had their integrity verified since they were built fifty years ago.
MS: Thinking beyond the UK, and to fire safety regulation of tall and other urban and peri-urban residential and commercial buildings, which nations do you think are setting the highest standards and why?
PM: I don’t think I know enough about regulatory standards internationally to be able to give a well-informed answer to this. But, I would suggest that anywhere mandating more than one staircase in tower blocks is building safer residential high rise buildings than the UK at the moment, and that will be most countries around the world. In terms of operational firefighting in tall buildings I think the works of Michael Reick and Paul Grimwood have had a profound and wide-reaching impact, they’ve both inspired and informed me.
MS: As discussed in Panarchistic Architecture, in the aftermath of San Francisco’s Great Fire of 1852, ‘the Committee on Bricks, Stones, and Timber’ posited it possible to create ‘fire-proof wood’, yet failed to materialise this biochemically-paradoxical concept. History repeating itself, we are seeing similar claims populate the architecture press and media of present. As someone that’s assessed fire-damage in newly and recently built timber structures, what are your thoughts on the idea that wood can be ‘fire-proofed’?
PM: Should that concept ever be fulfilled, and before it can be used to construct safe buildings, we would have to fullfil part two; that would involve achieving perfect recreations of test-standard structures using fire-proof timber on building sites. I like the sound of part two as much as I like the sound of fire-proof wood, but they are both currently somewhat idealistic.
MS: Another concept that’s widely popular within the architectural press and media is the idea of so-called ‘vertical forests’. Typically comprised young plants situated in highly environmentally-exposed positions, and in the absence of the nutritional, hydrological, and structural support that’s provided by the inter-connected root and mycorrhizal networks found in natural forests, it would be reasonable to assume that the resilience of these artificial biomes to threats including heatwaves, drought, high winds, and storms will be low. Given that now numerous data suggests that within a decade or less numerous towns and cities, both in the UK and beyond, will be experiencing acute water shortages, therein the likes of hosepipe bans, what are your thoughts on the potential fire hazards posed by foliage that populates tower block exteriors?
PM: It worries me. Just last week, as it happens, I submitted a CROSS (Confidential Reporting of Structural Safety) report in an attempt to bring attention to fire risks associated with poorly or badly informed management of ‘structural greening’, of this type. For example, it only needs a short period with a less than adequate water supply (for whatever reason) and many of them would quickly become little more than a large fuel load with an inherently low resistance to ignition.
MS: Beyond proposals for timber tower blocks and ‘vertical forests’, what are your thoughts on fire-literacy among the architectural research and practice community more generally?
PM: I don’t feel qualified to answer the question very well, but I have a couple of observations form my personal experience. With the divergence and fragmentation of design and construction processes, architects have become more distant, practically and through no fault of their own, from construction site activity, and that’s a negative evolution.
New builds and near-builds are often the focus of attention from architects and developers keen to visit. The large majority of a building’s life-span is spent occupied and in-use; how well buildings function during the in-use phase is largely down to design and how well the building managers make it work. I suspect if architects and building managers fostered closer working relationships they’d both stand to gain a lot by seeing and communicating how truly advantageous or inhibitive their decisions can be, in the long term, by better understanding each other’s limitations, intentions and aspirations.
MS: From satellite, ariel, and land-based sensing systems that enable real and near-to-real time monitoring of fire in wild, peri-urban, and urban landscapes to LIDAR tracking the inner workings of fire physics to AI software that enables finer-scale modelling of complex fire behaviours, myriad established and fast-emerging technologies are combining to expand our understanding of fire in the built environment of today and tomorrow. Which of these and other fire technologies interest you most and why?
PM: I’m genuinely excited by all such technologies, where they might take us and the potential of these advancements. My only caveat is that scientists, engineers and technologists would be well advised to remind themselves that, really, it’s all actually about people. Stay connected to that, it’s the best reason for doing anything.
MS: The year is 2030. Systemic policy and wider failures have led to a worst-case fire in the built environment scenario. Describe what you see in 250 words or less?
PM: Grenfell.
MS: Vice versa. The year is 2030. Describe the best-case fire in the built environment scenario?
PM: At the moment when I walk around Manchester, my home town, of an evening, I see thousands of tall empty offices everywhere. Those empty office buildings have hundreds of fire extinguishers, smart detection and alert systems that have a direct connection to fire services, at least two staircases, and tried and tested evacuation strategies. When I return to the suburbs to go home I see old tower blocks that are full of sleeping people. These blocks have no fire extinguishers, no alarm systems, only a single narrow staircase, and no evacuation strategies. I hope by 2030 we will have started to realise just how counter-intuitive our reality has become.
Find out more about Phil’s work here.
Images: Fire fighters, 2017 by @DeanHochman, used under CC BY 2.0 license, and Grenfell Tower, 2018 by @ChiralJon, used under CC BY 2.0 license.