In this episode of The Safe Leader Podcast, Mark McBride-Wright sits down with Benjamin Ralph, Director at Hollis and a leading voice in building safety and fire engineering. From setting fires in the fields of North Devon as a child (for science!) to influencing national building safety policy, Ben shares his deeply personal and professional journey into fire engineering.
Together, they explore how tragedy, like the Grenfell Tower fire, sparked critical changes in UK legislation, and why inclusive fire safety must become the new standard. With insights on equitable design, the future of building safety, and the next generation of engineers, this conversation challenges us to think differently about who is protected, and who is too often left behind.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello and welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted to be joined today by Benjamin Ralph, who is a director at Hollis. So Benjamin Ralph is a chartered engineer, dual registered with the institution of fire engineers and the institution of mechanical engineers, and serves as a director at Hollis, where he leads the building safety and fire service. He is dedicated to creating integrated, conscientious solutions across the property life cycle, encompassing design, construction, operation and beyond, through interdisciplinary problem solving and engineering analysis. Benjamin’s work aligns with critical industry frameworks, including the Hackett review, the Building Safety Act and the Grenfell inquiry, ensuring practical, adaptable and future ready solutions. He is a passionate advocate for equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and he’s particularly focused on disability, neurodiversity and inclusive design. His research interests include computational, natural language processing, complexity science and systems thinking in the built environment, alongside his expertise in fire experimentation and CFD based fire modeling at Hollis Benjamin champions clear practical advice helping clients navigate building safety with A commitment to exceeding compliance and delivering enduring value.
Benjamin Ralph 1:42
Ben Hello. Hey, Mark. Thanks very much for the intro and thanks for having me on the podcast today. Really looking forward to our chat.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:50
Remind me, best way to address your full name Benjamin or Ben,
Benjamin Ralph 1:54
Ben’s good. Ben’s good. Ben’s good,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:57
fantastic. So yeah, it’s been a few years since we last saw one another, I think in real life, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you the institution Engineering Technology awards once the young women engineer awards, you were a foster and partners back then, weren’t you? Yes, correct, yeah, yeah. So I guess we’ve crossed paths at various things that are where we’ve, you know, where we’ve run events and in the past, but it’s nice to actually get this, get this contact time with you and so on the podcast, I always like to with the guests, go back to your younger self, you Know, and sort of unpick what, what were your motivations, what led you to the career that you’re having now, what inspired you? So, you know you’ve that was a really impressive biography. First time I’ve read it. So there I was trying to get my mouth around. And so you’ve got a really impressive portfolio there where you then you’ve got a great, a great example of where you’ve really gone deep on a particular niche and then specialized, but still retain some flexibility and adaptability around you know, you’re not too niche, but you’re also not too, too broad. But, you know, fire engineering isn’t necessarily the first thing that young people might think of as something that they want to do. So what? What brought you to a career in in this space? What? What inspired you? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 3:36
sure thing. There’s probably two answers to the question, one that’s a little bit more romantic, and one that’s probably closer to the truth. To be honest, the slightly romantic one is that I grew up in North Devon, effectively the countryside, and I spent quite a lot of my childhood out and about in fields, in forests, setting fire to staff, not from a pyromaniac point of view, but learning about the physics of fire from an experiential perspective, setting a light to things, sending a light to some of my toys. And there’s a version reality where I say I could trace back my my professional life in fire safety, fire science, fire engineering. To those days, the slightly less romantic version of the story is that I was looking for a graduate engineering job, and my search criteria in the search engine was graduate Asterix engineer. And I was scrolling through and I saw graduate fire engineer, and I thought, huh, that sounds pretty cool. I like the sound of that. And here we are now. So I think the true, the true story, is somewhere in the middle of those two,
Mark McBride-Wright 4:55
wow. And I guess the fact that there’s. To. So you’re a fellow of the IFE and also of the IMECHE, so you’ve reached the top level that you can reach, you know, in those two respective institutions. So you’ve, how have you found? Well, actually, before we come to that, let’s go back to that graduate fire engineer job then that you saw, what, what? What were the steps that you took to, then to, then specialize, or, I guess you sort of specializing from, from the beginning, actually, aren’t you, because you you moved into, it’s not very often that you see fire engineer, I think, don’t think there are many courses that, yeah, so what? So what did you? Did you do mechanical engineering and then moved into fire engineering? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 5:47
my undergrad was actually civil engineering, and I worked for one year as a civil engineer, and that was what you think of as bread and butter, civil engineering, roads, roads, roads build ups, car parking, drainage, flood, things like that. And then I got this job, graduate fire engineer, and you’re absolutely right that there isn’t a great deal of in the same way as if you compare it to something like civil engineering or mechanical engineering or aeronautical engineering, there isn’t a massive choice of undergraduate education for fire engineering. So what you’ll find, often, and it’s the case for me, is that a lot of folk who now are practicing fire engineers, they might be chartered engineers, registered with institution of fire engineers, for example, they actually come from quite a wide range of discipline backgrounds. They might be mechanical engineers. They might have an undergraduate in chemical engineering, any of the engineer engineering disciplines, really, or even further further than that, into physics or mathematics. And then there’s another route into being becoming a fire professional, a fire safety professional. Some people come into it from a fire and rescue background, so they they’re a fire safety they specialize within the Fire and Rescue Service with respect to fire safety, and then they specialize further into the consultancy side of things. That’s another typical route into fire safety profession.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:28
So, what you mentioned, and it’s so in the in the overview there, there were, you know, you mentioned, there was mentioned to some very, very new legislation that’s come into enforcement in the in the United Kingdom, through the the Grenfell tragedy, leading to the Building Safety Act and all that being created from Judith Hackett’s review of the sector. How are you seeing uptake on you know what? What do you know? Actually, it’d be useful if you could just give an overview of of of the whole chain of influence there. You know what? What? What happened at Grenfell from a fire perspective, what, what the review found, and you know what the act is now requiring organizations to do? Because I don’t think many of the listeners will will, and we’ve got quite an international audience as well, so they might not be familiar with it. Yeah, okay,
Benjamin Ralph 8:28
so there was a very large tragic fire in central London in a quite a wealthy local authority, and really unfortunately, as part of this tragic incident, 72 individuals lost their life, and it shocked the nation really, both in terms of the level of loss of life and also the frosty of the fire the imagery that was captured at that fire event is quite shocking, and that initialized lots of different things in lots of parts of the of the built environment, of the sector of the of the disciplines and industries that will work together as Part of the built environment. And one thing that was initialized was an independent review carried out by Dame Judith Hackett, which people call the Hackett review. And that was a piece of work that was done relatively soon after the fire, and was carried out, given the scale of the report quite quickly, and it spent a lot of its a lot of its content, looking at the regulatory system, and you can trace most of what then has now become the Building Safety Act. A lot of the. The requirements, the prescriptive requirements, the regulatory requirements, the framework requirements, back to that, the Hackett review. Of course, there’s other things that have been going on. There was a public inquiry into the fire at Grenfell, which was spread over two phases that was a much, much longer process. The second report has now been issued with a set of recommendations, but also a lot of very deep, nuanced analysis that has quite deep ramifications for any professional really, working within the built environment at any stage with respect to building safety and fire and then other bits and pieces, industry driven things, looking at competency, looking at good practice, looking at The whole supply chain, really, you know, all the way down to passive fire protection, to competency, competency frameworks and standard approaches, things like that.
Mark McBride-Wright 11:12
Yeah, I my, I never, ever really worked in built environment safety. The closest I got to sort of fire work was doing fire and gas mapping and modeling for offshore assets, and then looking at, you know, different layers of protection, or looking at, you know, preventative protection over reactive protection, or passive PFP and AFP active fire protection and passive fire protection and aqueous film forming foam, I think, eff or something, the stuff they used to put in the thing. It’s really funny now, living in New York, just the difference in with regard to attitudes to fire safety. You know, only last week in our building, the PA was being tested. And, I mean, I knew it was there, but I had never heard it, so to then just hear this voice coming into the apartment here was it just made you feel, I feel safer in this building than I do when I’ve been in high rises back at home. You know, there’s sprinklers in every room. The fire escapes are clearly separate in a isolated, you know, block on the side of the building, the doors are really, really, really heavy, really heavy, to the point that they’re almost my daughter actually chipped her toenail on store a few, a few weeks ago, which we’ve been tending to the poorly patient. But just a lot more. It feels like a lot more goes into the design over over here, like it’s my experience anyway. Now being a resident in in in New York and so with new builds in the United Kingdom, is the same level of rigor and requirement going into having to have, you know, sprinklers throughout houses and throughout apartments and in hallways and what have
Benjamin Ralph 13:20
you Yeah. Sure thing, yep. So one thing to say right up front is that the with respect to statistics, fire statistics, incidents, injuries and fatalities, the UK is a very well performing country internationally, and it’s something that as an industry, we’ve all previously been quite, quite proud of, really. And the number coming down, of course, the fire at Grenfell didn’t align with with that historic reduction in fire fatalities and fire injuries, as you might imagine, different countries all around the world, they take a different approach to fire safety design of buildings. It of course, it’s quite difficult to say one approach is better or worse, because more often than not, it’s a culmination of lots of different elements that sit together as part of an overall, overall system. And that system is a building. But then there’s also a wider system around that building professionals and competencies and third party or, you know, the regulatory system or third party diligence and things like this, to just specifically pick up the two countries that you mentioned there, the UK and the US, and definitely what you’ve described there aligns with what I would expect in that very generally, the UK has always taken an approach. Approach of passive fire protection. So things like compartmentation. Thing you know approaches like compartmentation, protected means of egress, protected corridors, fire doors, fire floors, which effectively minimize the amount of area that a fire, when started, can grow to and spread throughout a building, whereas the US, more often than not, leans on active measures. So things like sprinklers is a good example, and less so on the approaches that we do in the UK, like compartmentation.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:40
Thank you to one. Paul I you’d want both oil range you had both. You had AFP and PFP, yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 15:48
yeah. And of course they there are, there’s a combination of both, both. But maybe that needle moves a bit from country to country. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 15:58
true. Um, so mentioned in your intro there about how you know you’re you’re a big advocate, big, big believer in the values of equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging. So how, how is that influenced your approach to engineering and safety in the built environment? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 16:18
so there’s, there’s some less zero in on just on fire safety then, and probably two interesting things to talk about, one being means of egress from a building. So of course, a core, core part of a fire safety strategy for a building is, how are people going to get out of that building when there is a fire and there’s some intricacies around phased evacuation or zoned evacuation, or, you know, different approaches of evacuation notwithstanding, a fundamental tenant of a fire safety strategy is, if people need to get out, how are they going to get out? And that, of course, you can’t think about means of egress without thinking about means of egress, an inclusive form of means of egress. So systems egress, systems that might work for some folk might well not work for other folk, the most obvious being sets of stairs, for example. And there is a tendency, a tendency that I’d encourage everybody to try and avoid, in thinking that the only group of individuals that are excluded by a means of egress system that relies on stairs are people in wheelchairs. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Of course, there’s many more groups of individuals, both from a transient perspective and also a permanent perspective, people who have difficulty moving up and down stairs for all sorts of different reasons. So that’s a at fire safety strategy level. That’s a way that fire safety design really stares down the you know, stair that stares down the face of inclusivity. And there are approaches, for example, evacuation lifts or evacuation elevators, depending on which side of the pond you are, which are a practical measure which enables people that can’t or might have difficulty in moving down the stairs and moving down the stairs. At another layer of the system, there’s something a bit more fundamental, which is what people call equitable fire safety. So it’s an idea that people who are finding their place of home, work or play in buildings like most of us, they’re afforded a different level of fire safety compared to other people, for example, socio economic grouping might cause, and is, the data illustrates quite you know, there’s, there’s clear connectivity between socio economic group and the level of fire safety, which, of course, is that should worry us. You know, that should really, that shouldn’t sit well with anyone, and then you bleed into other less well represented groups that may be afforded a lower level of fire safety, which, again, it simply shouldn’t sit well With us, as as practicing engineers, as as professionals and as leaders.
Mark McBride-Wright 19:45
So where do you Well, could you drill down a bit more then into who those groups might be that are afforded or that lower level
Benjamin Ralph 19:53
of protection? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. There’s a. One particular group, that it’s positive because there is more of a discussion around these individual people, people that live in informal housing. And when, when people talk about informal housing, informal settlements, perhaps some people and some listeners today might be thinking about shanty towns on the edge of on the edge of large cities around the world, formed of, you know, corrugated metal and bits of plastic or something like that. And of course, those are informal settlements. But there are other there are other types of informal living that exist all over all over the world. For example, folk living and sleeping in tents, people that have moved into buildings which have been abandoned all sorts of different people, so that that’s a that’s one extreme edge of that scale. But of course, there are, there’s, there’s a whole spectrum with respect to that equitable fire safety. And you can easily imagine that housing, the, you know, the level of both physical fire safety measures, but also management, the quality of management, the quality of operation of of those physical fire safety elements and measures. You’ll see a Delta there, yeah, with respect to a you know, to take your example, there a super, super fancy condo. I’m making the assumption that you live in a super fancy condo down to something that isn’t quite that
Mark McBride-Wright 21:58
in the design process then, or working with, working with design teams on new builds or on retrofits, on brownfield facilities or existing buildings and renovation and what have you you know, what’s coming to my mind now is the Royal Institution of British architects, Rebus, you know, 10 stage design cycle process, how strong and prominent and embedded is your area of practice into that cycle. Because what I found when work that I’ve done on inclusive design before is that these considerations become a bit of an afterthought, or a bit too late in the chain, and then some of your degrees of freedom are sort of pinned down, and you’ve got less flexibility to do what you would have done had it been fully considered early on. So do you feel like the behavior in your peers and across the sector is now? It is fundamental, and it’s always considered, or sometimes it designs still pass through and you pick things up that shouldn’t be there at that stage in the design because there’s been a misunderstanding or lack of involvement earlier on in the in the design process. Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 23:18
I would say that I’ve witnessed there has been a change following the fire at Grenfell. That change isn’t probably consistent across every single individual actor within the vast, vast, extremely complicated industry of industries, which is the built environment, the fact that we don’t really know, you know, I’m using the phrase built environment, some people call it design and construction. Some people call it property. Some people, you know, there’s, we almost can’t even altogether agree on a name of what to call it. But what people do really recognize is that it’s not one industry. It’s lots of different industries all linked together in a very complicated way, and that complication is only getting one way as well. You know, supply chains are becoming more and more fragmented, and sub consulting to sub consulting to sub consulting, that sort of stuff. But yeah. So it’s important to think about that as the context, because in such a complicated and complex, interwoven overarching system, there’s a lot of inertia so things that are happening in part of that system aren’t necessarily going to be propagated through the entire system. So I think the that variation is still there definitely, and you might see that variation in in awareness, depending on the. Sector, perhaps, or the the size of organization, or the type of work that organization is doing. So I think there’s a long winded answer, really, of saying on a good day, I think people are thinking about it, and on a bad day, they’re still probably not thinking about it as much as you know, as as we might hope, what
Mark McBride-Wright 25:25
what could Is there anything that could be done cross sector or through collaboration between the institution of fire engineers, the institution of mechanical engineers, other professional engineering bodies? Is there anything that could be done to crystallize all this down into a really is the a really simple design methodology piece that, because where I find things often fall down in this, in these complex and complicated systems as you describe, is the fact that we all work in silos, and actually, we’re not the best as an industry at communicating and cross communicating. And so is there any combination of doing that well that I’ve just described, that you think might actually then make more actors in the space? Have it front of mind more frequently, is there, sort of like a cross engineering comms campaign or awareness raising initiative that that we should consider to try and make it more front of mind for more people? There
Benjamin Ralph 26:33
is? There’s definitely a lot of really good work happening, cross cross discipline, cross professional engineering institution and other professional institutions as well, lots of people dedicating a lot of time and effort and brain power and to try and solve these problems across the gamut of good practice, standard approaches To what does good look like? Look like from a competency perspective, the creation of new competency frameworks. And that’s that is good. I think that professional engineering institutions and other institutions that didn’t previously talk to each other are talking to each other more, which is fantastic. My observations are that, and definitely have been that when, and this is talking UK centric, there are events, conferences, workshops, organized by either industry organizations or the building safety regulator. For example, the new regulator, absolutely fantastic. Lots of really great collaboration and networking and the initialization of partnerships. My observation is that, of course, you start to see the same people, yeah, you know, the same people that are interested, the same people that care, the same people that are passionate and believe in it, and and then the risk in that, of course, is that it becomes not quite an echo chamber, but it just becomes a room of a couple 100 people really violently agreeing with each other. Yeah. So I think that there is, there’s something around the then all of that good work rippling further out. And I think that that communication could take lots of different forms. It definitely could be programs of formal communication and the building safety regulator are doing lots of work there. But it can simply be as well the people in that room going out and talking to colleagues, talking to their network, encouraging them into that room. I do definitely think that. The fact is, now, as part of the Building Safety Act, we have a new regulator called the building safety regulator, which sits within the Health and Safety Executive. And if there’s carrots and sticks, that’s the stick. Yeah, is the regulator, and I think that that will start to move the needle also
Mark McBride-Wright 29:27
on behavior. And I might be imagining this, but I think I remember seeing something on the Engineering Council website that the Engineering Council has taken responsibility, or convening responsibility for a set of like a competency framework, yes, yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 29:47
yeah, yeah. So relatively, relatively soon after the fire at Grenfell tower, it became apparent that competency was. Was a key, key issue. And everybody is relatively familiar about thinking, competency, skills, knowledge, experience and then behavior was very quickly folded into that. And then a working group, which is it initially started as it was called, the competency steering group. Later, the industry competency competency steering group was formed, spearheaded, really by the CIC and the CLC, lots of three letter three letter acronyms, and there were a number of working groups. For example, working group one engineers. Were the engineers, and then there were designers, there were building safety managers, there were contractors, there was a whole installers, whole whole bunch of people, and they went away to to collaboratively co create what good looks like with respect to competency. And you’re absolutely right that that working group one, which I sat on, working group one engineers were part of the convening group was the Engineering Council UK. So as of right now, we listeners might be familiar with the UK spec, so it’s a set of competencies that chartered engineers are measured against to be able to be registered as a chartered engineer. We now have a UK spec, HRB, high risk building, which is, you could think of it as a sort of a specialization bolt on level up. People initially were calling it ch star or CH plus. But it’s this idea. It’s a recognition that people that are working on residential buildings, tall residential buildings, which are very, very complicated beasts, may well need a higher level of competency compared to people not working on those types of buildings. It’s early days. It is early days. There’s a small number of professional engineering institutions which which can register chartered engineers. Yeah. So still, still a bit of a work in progress.
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
Amazing. Well, yeah, so I should say it’s so January 2025, to give a bit of a timestamp on this recording for for anyone listening to it, in the future, when some of these things have started to take root and have, hopefully have the intended impact that they’re designed to have. Looking at your profile, you, you have quite a bit of work in in academia as well. You’ve sort of had a research theme to your to your sort of expertise and to what you do. So just wanted to find out a bit more about about your your work there.
Benjamin Ralph 33:06
Yep, I carried out my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and my topic was related primarily to CFD based fire modeling, development of and experimentation that was carried out to validate the new capabilities of the CFD based fire modeling as part of the time I was at Edinburgh, there was a Really brilliant opportunity to go over to Washington, DC, and spent some time as a guest researcher at the national institution of Standards and Technology.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:48
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Benjamin Ralph 33:49
Who are the developers of a piece of software called Fire dynamic simulator, FDS, which is the most used CFD based fire model within the within the fire engineering discipline, yeah? Fantastic piece, fantastic tool, open source, collaborative, continuously, continuously integrated. Yeah, it was, yeah, absolutely fantastic opportunity to spend over there.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:23
And you did some you’ve done some work at Brunel University as well. I think there were some. Yep,
Benjamin Ralph 34:30
I was a visiting professor at Brunel for their undergraduate building services engineering, right course, yeah. And the intent behind that was to try and try and encourage the students to think about Fire Safety Engineering as part of their their one of their final major projects, which was a design building, building services, design of a building.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:59
So what, what role do you think academia plays in helping advance building safety, you know the sort of theory and the practice. Do you see students coming out with enough, enough of an understanding to then, when they’re doing what you did those years ago, graduate engineer, and they’re seeing graduate engineer come up. Do you feel like the system’s now priming the next generation with the right skills that they need for where the sector is at now? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 35:30
sure thing. There’s definitely, of course, there’s a two way feedback loop between what you could call academia and industry. Academia is creating new knowledge, creating new skilled individuals that feed into industry. And then industry are, you know, and I use the terms in their most broadest way, industry are coming up with the problems effectively. You know, these are the pain points. One thing worth talking about specifically is apprenticeships. So I’m an external examiner at Birmingham City University BCU, which is running a Fire Safety Engineering apprenticeship program, Bachelor of Engineering, bachelor’s of engineering program. And I think apprenticeships are a good way of putting those two groupings, those two interacting elements of academia and industry, closer together, whereby the students are out there, out and about, working on real real problems, real industry problems, on a day to day, hour to hour basis, and then going Back learning in a formal academic setting. And of course, there’s that can only be a good thing, that that connectivity, I think,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:10
yeah, definitely, definitely, it’s fun. Yeah, BCU and the work we’ve been doing at IFE district fire engineers like the Birmingham set University are also one of our the equal engineers university partners. So, yeah, brilliant, yeah. Probably need to have another conversation with you about triangulating some impact or something, overlap of opportunity that’s maybe there to coordinate
Benjamin Ralph 37:40
and as well, for me, another fantastic about, fantastic thing about apprenticeships is that it unlocks that level of education for a whole bunch of people that that could have just been Not, not a practical, practical choice at all. Yeah. So that’s absolutely, absolutely fantastic. It
Mark McBride-Wright 38:05
really helps with social mobility into the sector. Oh, yeah, and it’s a really great I mean, even if I look back on I sometimes wonder now if I would, if I were to start again, would I do what I did with the cost of education. Now, tertiary education, you know, to earn whilst you learn, as they say, with an apprenticeship. So long as I could get that feeling of meeting peers and being on almost like some apprenticeship programs are so large, aren’t they that? Well, actually, no. I mean, if universities are running you almost get the best of both. Then actually, don’t you get that university type feel, but you’re doing on apprenticeship, you know, meeting other people, like having peers, basically on your program?
Benjamin Ralph 38:53
Yeah, I am aware that some people like everything on a good day, something can be good. On a bad day, it can be less good. I’m aware that some people one critique of apprenticeships is that on a bad day, it could undermine the pure academic ness of the academic side of things. You know, students have this opportunity to this one shot at unfettered academic thought and freedom before they’re thrown into the real world. And you know all the nasty things that adults know everything about, tears into your academic utopia. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 39:41
Well, I think, I think there’s a halfway benefit. You know, one of the universities we worked at had an integrated year in industry, and it was mandatory in order to graduate. It wasn’t sort of, you go and do, I mean, I deliberately didn’t do it in period. Deal. Because if you wanted to do a year in industry, you have to, or you had to organize off your own accord, and then come back and then join the year that was below you. No way I’m doing that. I want to get I’ll do internships, you know, in the summer, but yeah, no way did I want to, like, see all my friends sort of finish a year,
Benjamin Ralph 40:21
you know, wearing their gowns 12 months before you that’s definitely
Mark McBride-Wright 40:25
the way I felt back then. But I’ve met a couple of engineers that did have that foresight, took that pause, went and did that, and then it just paid dividends for them in the early stages of their graduate career, because they’d already worked for a year. You know, they were familiar with workplace politics and because it’s a bit of an art sometimes, isn’t it to navigate in the corporate world?
Benjamin Ralph 40:50
Yeah, I would say that the some of the the younger engineers and graduate engineers that I meet at, for example, institution and mechanical engineers. Events blow me away with their their level of experience and insight into the industry as 2021 year olds, yeah, which gives me a lot of hope, yeah, yeah, or maybe I was just hanging out with all the wrong people when I was 21
Mark McBride-Wright 41:22
it’s up to us now to help bring these people in the sector and make sure they feel included and they’re supported as they come in, and we can impart that knowledge and wisdom, but also be open to challenge, because it’s a two way street as well. You know, like maybe the next generation are learning things in a way that, I mean, I was on a webinar yesterday. It’s a safety engineering working group, and they were talking, we were talking about developing, it was my first time in the meeting, and they were talking about developing webinars for this and webinars for that. And someone mentioned that maybe it’s not the best forum for imparting information to the next generation of engineers that are coming in who are all sort of Tiktok centered and just the top information needing access. I’m like that. That’s not a small issue. That’s quite a big issue, because you’re about to in all this effort to create knowledge, generate knowledge, capture knowledge, and then produce it into something that isn’t going to be looked at, you know. So I really do think there need, I guess that that was one of my thoughts I was having when I asked the question about communications. You know, I think one of the things we need to do better as a sector is meeting the future talent where it’s at and coming and finding them and communicating to them in the way that they’re used to consuming content. I think that’s one of the things we’re sort of missing a trick on, and probably is negatively affecting the potential that talent attraction could have to the sector. We’re just not selling it in the right way or through the right the right forums. You know what one of the engineers who won our engineering graduate of the Year category at the engineering talent awards, Mohammed Tahir, he now runs his own company called the airport guy, and his his videos showing behind the scenes at Heathrow Airport have had millions of
Benjamin Ralph 43:29
Yeah, including me, I’ve seen them,
Mark McBride-Wright 43:31
yeah. He now does consultancy work for brands that want to attract Gen Z. And you know, you see these highly over styled corporate videos that the people commissioning them like with all the fancy cutaways and soft music playing, and they don’t get watched. They only get watched by those what actually people want is access through the phone to see what it’s like on the job there and then. So I think he did some work with British Airways, and they are there for their early career program, and the videos that they produced through him led to something like 50 to 70% of their graduate applications, apprentice applications, and then they won an award at some recruitment industry award forum. So, you know, I think that his style is an example of the sort of style that, on a mass scale we should be looking at for, you know, for for some sort of traction, tragic. Now, it’s today that the Supreme Court in the US have just said that they’re going to ban tick tock and yeah, so who knows whether or not tick tock will even still exist over here in the US after this episode recording, yeah, in the weeks to come. But oh,
Benjamin Ralph 44:49
Little Red Book Now, as I understand it, red note, red
Mark McBride-Wright 44:54
note, yeah, yeah. This other night, I haven’t looked into that. I’m glad. I’m just glad I didn’t invest too much time. Been growing a Tiktok forward. Hopefully LinkedIn will stay fine. Okay, quick fire questions, I just realized the word fire in that quick fire question, very good. Okay, what’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on, and why I
Benjamin Ralph 45:18
had the opportunity to work on a building called the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Center in Melbourne, Australia, which was a 1.5 billion Aussie dollar research treatment teaching facility. And probably the most exciting thing about it is that it had a particle collider in the basement.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:46
Who has been the biggest influence on your career? What did you learn from them?
Benjamin Ralph 45:52
At the risk of giving a bit of a try to answer, my dad, my father, who is and still is a practicing structural and civil engineer. So that’s where I learned, you know, that’s, that’s where I saw, found engineering. So he was the introduction to engineering, the engineering practice, and I still to this day learn things from him, with respect to client care and engineering professionalism.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:26
If you can improve one aspect of building safety overnight, what would it be?
Benjamin Ralph 46:33
I think I’d go to fire safety equality. Yeah, I think the the inequality that we see with respect to fire safety afforded to different groups, should should worry a lot of people.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:51
What’s the one book or resource every fire safety professional should read?
Benjamin Ralph 46:56
Easy one, an introduction to fire dynamics by Professor Dougal dryersdale, who worked at the University of Edinburgh. Perhaps I’m biased, and it’s widely known as the people call it the Bible, the fire science Bible.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:16
What’s the one book or resource every that one What advice would you give to someone just starting in Fire Safety Engineering?
Benjamin Ralph 47:26
It would be, get out and about. Get out to workshops, conferences, CPD, events, meet, meet the folks that are there. Network, widely.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:41
Great advice. How do you stay motivated and inspired in such a challenging and technical field
Benjamin Ralph 47:50
with difficulty? Joking, for me, I think you have to. I was listening to a podcast the other day about burnout and the risk factors for burnout, and of course, there’s there’s volume, and there’s difficulty and there’s but the conclusion of the guest on the works on the podcast was that if you haven’t got support from colleagues and friends, that’s the one key risk factor. So yeah, with respect to me staying motivated and inspired, it has to be the people around me, colleagues, friends and family.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:30
Yeah, burnout. That’s another fire analogy. There, just making these connections. Now, it’s quite, quite ingrained in our language, isn’t it, what’s the most misunderstood aspect of fire safety in the built environment?
Benjamin Ralph 48:46
A probably a bit of a silly one, is the what you could think of as the Hollywood fallacy of sprinklers. When one sprinkler goes off, every single sprinkler head operates within a building which isn’t the case.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:04
I’m glad you clarified that, because I thought that was the case build. If you could work on any landmark building, past or present, what would it be and why
Benjamin Ralph 49:16
there is a property in the City of London, 41 cloth Fair, which is the only, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only building which survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, so I’d love to work on that building. And, of course, heritage buildings, from a fire safety perspective, extremely challenging, but from an engineering perspective, lots to get your teeth into.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:48
What’s the one skill you believe is essential for the next generation of fire engineers?
Benjamin Ralph 49:55
So I think two years ago, I’d probably say coding. I. But within a context of where we are generative AI and the help with respect to coding that generative AI can give, I probably wouldn’t say coding, and I’d say either data science abroad, a broad awareness and understanding of data science or complexity science, probably.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:21
And what’s your one what’s your proudest professional achievement today?
Benjamin Ralph 50:29
Hard to pick one, really, I am. I feel proud about what we’re doing at Hollis at the minute, with respect to providing integrated, practical fire safety solutions that that sit aligned with or weave together other broader project objectives, like decarbonization, like repositioning of assets like upgrade, like retrofit,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:02
amazing tea or coffee. Tea. And are you an early morning person or an evening person?
Benjamin Ralph 51:16
Evening for sure. No hesitation there. Evening for sure. Brilliant.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:20
Well, thank you very much. Ben, it’s been really good. Really enjoyed chatting to you. I’ve got loads more that I could have asked, but, yeah, no, I think it’s a really interesting area of of engineering. In fact, we haven’t even spoken about the fires that have been happening in Los Angeles the time of this recording. It just, it just goes to demonstrate that the risk is there with with fire, but if managed rightly, with the right systems, with the right professionals behind every design and every project, you know, we can live in a safe world. And the world is ever changing around us. So a career in fire engineering will always be a career in fire engineering, actually, isn’t it? It’s one of those, one of those careers that you say, well, we’ll always need fire engineers.
Benjamin Ralph 52:08
I believe. So, yeah, I believe so, yeah. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Mark. Really enjoyed
Mark McBride-Wright 52:14
it. So if people want to get in touch with you, how do they find out more about your work?
Benjamin Ralph 52:18
Yeah, sure thing. Go ahead and look me up on LinkedIn. Send me a request, send me a message,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:27
perfect. Well, we’ll put the link to your profile in the show notes in the transcript. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Ben, catch up soon.
Benjamin Ralph 52:35
Cheers. Marks. Take it easy. Bye.
E018: Engineering Fire Safety for Everyone
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello and welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted to be joined today by Benjamin Ralph, who is a director at Hollis. So Benjamin Ralph is a chartered engineer, dual registered with the institution of fire engineers and the institution of mechanical engineers, and serves as a director at Hollis, where he leads the building safety and fire service. He is dedicated to creating integrated, conscientious solutions across the property life cycle, encompassing design, construction, operation and beyond, through interdisciplinary problem solving and engineering analysis. Benjamin’s work aligns with critical industry frameworks, including the Hackett review, the Building Safety Act and the Grenfell inquiry, ensuring practical, adaptable and future ready solutions. He is a passionate advocate for equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and he’s particularly focused on disability, neurodiversity and inclusive design. His research interests include computational, natural language processing, complexity science and systems thinking in the built environment, alongside his expertise in fire experimentation and CFD based fire modeling at Hollis Benjamin champions clear practical advice helping clients navigate building safety with A commitment to exceeding compliance and delivering enduring value.
Benjamin Ralph 1:42
Ben Hello. Hey, Mark. Thanks very much for the intro and thanks for having me on the podcast today. Really looking forward to our chat.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:50
Remind me, best way to address your full name Benjamin or Ben,
Benjamin Ralph 1:54
Ben’s good. Ben’s good. Ben’s good,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:57
fantastic. So yeah, it’s been a few years since we last saw one another, I think in real life, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you the institution Engineering Technology awards once the young women engineer awards, you were a foster and partners back then, weren’t you? Yes, correct, yeah, yeah. So I guess we’ve crossed paths at various things that are where we’ve, you know, where we’ve run events and in the past, but it’s nice to actually get this, get this contact time with you and so on the podcast, I always like to with the guests, go back to your younger self, you Know, and sort of unpick what, what were your motivations, what led you to the career that you’re having now, what inspired you? So, you know you’ve that was a really impressive biography. First time I’ve read it. So there I was trying to get my mouth around. And so you’ve got a really impressive portfolio there where you then you’ve got a great, a great example of where you’ve really gone deep on a particular niche and then specialized, but still retain some flexibility and adaptability around you know, you’re not too niche, but you’re also not too, too broad. But, you know, fire engineering isn’t necessarily the first thing that young people might think of as something that they want to do. So what? What brought you to a career in in this space? What? What inspired you? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 3:36
sure thing. There’s probably two answers to the question, one that’s a little bit more romantic, and one that’s probably closer to the truth. To be honest, the slightly romantic one is that I grew up in North Devon, effectively the countryside, and I spent quite a lot of my childhood out and about in fields, in forests, setting fire to staff, not from a pyromaniac point of view, but learning about the physics of fire from an experiential perspective, setting a light to things, sending a light to some of my toys. And there’s a version reality where I say I could trace back my my professional life in fire safety, fire science, fire engineering. To those days, the slightly less romantic version of the story is that I was looking for a graduate engineering job, and my search criteria in the search engine was graduate Asterix engineer. And I was scrolling through and I saw graduate fire engineer, and I thought, huh, that sounds pretty cool. I like the sound of that. And here we are now. So I think the true, the true story, is somewhere in the middle of those two,
Mark McBride-Wright 4:55
wow. And I guess the fact that there’s. To. So you’re a fellow of the IFE and also of the IMECHE, so you’ve reached the top level that you can reach, you know, in those two respective institutions. So you’ve, how have you found? Well, actually, before we come to that, let’s go back to that graduate fire engineer job then that you saw, what, what? What were the steps that you took to, then to, then specialize, or, I guess you sort of specializing from, from the beginning, actually, aren’t you, because you you moved into, it’s not very often that you see fire engineer, I think, don’t think there are many courses that, yeah, so what? So what did you? Did you do mechanical engineering and then moved into fire engineering? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 5:47
my undergrad was actually civil engineering, and I worked for one year as a civil engineer, and that was what you think of as bread and butter, civil engineering, roads, roads, roads build ups, car parking, drainage, flood, things like that. And then I got this job, graduate fire engineer, and you’re absolutely right that there isn’t a great deal of in the same way as if you compare it to something like civil engineering or mechanical engineering or aeronautical engineering, there isn’t a massive choice of undergraduate education for fire engineering. So what you’ll find, often, and it’s the case for me, is that a lot of folk who now are practicing fire engineers, they might be chartered engineers, registered with institution of fire engineers, for example, they actually come from quite a wide range of discipline backgrounds. They might be mechanical engineers. They might have an undergraduate in chemical engineering, any of the engineer engineering disciplines, really, or even further further than that, into physics or mathematics. And then there’s another route into being becoming a fire professional, a fire safety professional. Some people come into it from a fire and rescue background, so they they’re a fire safety they specialize within the Fire and Rescue Service with respect to fire safety, and then they specialize further into the consultancy side of things. That’s another typical route into fire safety profession.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:28
So, what you mentioned, and it’s so in the in the overview there, there were, you know, you mentioned, there was mentioned to some very, very new legislation that’s come into enforcement in the in the United Kingdom, through the the Grenfell tragedy, leading to the Building Safety Act and all that being created from Judith Hackett’s review of the sector. How are you seeing uptake on you know what? What do you know? Actually, it’d be useful if you could just give an overview of of of the whole chain of influence there. You know what? What? What happened at Grenfell from a fire perspective, what, what the review found, and you know what the act is now requiring organizations to do? Because I don’t think many of the listeners will will, and we’ve got quite an international audience as well, so they might not be familiar with it. Yeah, okay,
Benjamin Ralph 8:28
so there was a very large tragic fire in central London in a quite a wealthy local authority, and really unfortunately, as part of this tragic incident, 72 individuals lost their life, and it shocked the nation really, both in terms of the level of loss of life and also the frosty of the fire the imagery that was captured at that fire event is quite shocking, and that initialized lots of different things in lots of parts of the of the built environment, of the sector of the of the disciplines and industries that will work together as Part of the built environment. And one thing that was initialized was an independent review carried out by Dame Judith Hackett, which people call the Hackett review. And that was a piece of work that was done relatively soon after the fire, and was carried out, given the scale of the report quite quickly, and it spent a lot of its a lot of its content, looking at the regulatory system, and you can trace most of what then has now become the Building Safety Act. A lot of the. The requirements, the prescriptive requirements, the regulatory requirements, the framework requirements, back to that, the Hackett review. Of course, there’s other things that have been going on. There was a public inquiry into the fire at Grenfell, which was spread over two phases that was a much, much longer process. The second report has now been issued with a set of recommendations, but also a lot of very deep, nuanced analysis that has quite deep ramifications for any professional really, working within the built environment at any stage with respect to building safety and fire and then other bits and pieces, industry driven things, looking at competency, looking at good practice, looking at The whole supply chain, really, you know, all the way down to passive fire protection, to competency, competency frameworks and standard approaches, things like that.
Mark McBride-Wright 11:12
Yeah, I my, I never, ever really worked in built environment safety. The closest I got to sort of fire work was doing fire and gas mapping and modeling for offshore assets, and then looking at, you know, different layers of protection, or looking at, you know, preventative protection over reactive protection, or passive PFP and AFP active fire protection and passive fire protection and aqueous film forming foam, I think, eff or something, the stuff they used to put in the thing. It’s really funny now, living in New York, just the difference in with regard to attitudes to fire safety. You know, only last week in our building, the PA was being tested. And, I mean, I knew it was there, but I had never heard it, so to then just hear this voice coming into the apartment here was it just made you feel, I feel safer in this building than I do when I’ve been in high rises back at home. You know, there’s sprinklers in every room. The fire escapes are clearly separate in a isolated, you know, block on the side of the building, the doors are really, really, really heavy, really heavy, to the point that they’re almost my daughter actually chipped her toenail on store a few, a few weeks ago, which we’ve been tending to the poorly patient. But just a lot more. It feels like a lot more goes into the design over over here, like it’s my experience anyway. Now being a resident in in in New York and so with new builds in the United Kingdom, is the same level of rigor and requirement going into having to have, you know, sprinklers throughout houses and throughout apartments and in hallways and what have
Benjamin Ralph 13:20
you Yeah. Sure thing, yep. So one thing to say right up front is that the with respect to statistics, fire statistics, incidents, injuries and fatalities, the UK is a very well performing country internationally, and it’s something that as an industry, we’ve all previously been quite, quite proud of, really. And the number coming down, of course, the fire at Grenfell didn’t align with with that historic reduction in fire fatalities and fire injuries, as you might imagine, different countries all around the world, they take a different approach to fire safety design of buildings. It of course, it’s quite difficult to say one approach is better or worse, because more often than not, it’s a culmination of lots of different elements that sit together as part of an overall, overall system. And that system is a building. But then there’s also a wider system around that building professionals and competencies and third party or, you know, the regulatory system or third party diligence and things like this, to just specifically pick up the two countries that you mentioned there, the UK and the US, and definitely what you’ve described there aligns with what I would expect in that very generally, the UK has always taken an approach. Approach of passive fire protection. So things like compartmentation. Thing you know approaches like compartmentation, protected means of egress, protected corridors, fire doors, fire floors, which effectively minimize the amount of area that a fire, when started, can grow to and spread throughout a building, whereas the US, more often than not, leans on active measures. So things like sprinklers is a good example, and less so on the approaches that we do in the UK, like compartmentation.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:40
Thank you to one. Paul I you’d want both oil range you had both. You had AFP and PFP, yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 15:48
yeah. And of course they there are, there’s a combination of both, both. But maybe that needle moves a bit from country to country. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 15:58
true. Um, so mentioned in your intro there about how you know you’re you’re a big advocate, big, big believer in the values of equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging. So how, how is that influenced your approach to engineering and safety in the built environment? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 16:18
so there’s, there’s some less zero in on just on fire safety then, and probably two interesting things to talk about, one being means of egress from a building. So of course, a core, core part of a fire safety strategy for a building is, how are people going to get out of that building when there is a fire and there’s some intricacies around phased evacuation or zoned evacuation, or, you know, different approaches of evacuation notwithstanding, a fundamental tenant of a fire safety strategy is, if people need to get out, how are they going to get out? And that, of course, you can’t think about means of egress without thinking about means of egress, an inclusive form of means of egress. So systems egress, systems that might work for some folk might well not work for other folk, the most obvious being sets of stairs, for example. And there is a tendency, a tendency that I’d encourage everybody to try and avoid, in thinking that the only group of individuals that are excluded by a means of egress system that relies on stairs are people in wheelchairs. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Of course, there’s many more groups of individuals, both from a transient perspective and also a permanent perspective, people who have difficulty moving up and down stairs for all sorts of different reasons. So that’s a at fire safety strategy level. That’s a way that fire safety design really stares down the you know, stair that stares down the face of inclusivity. And there are approaches, for example, evacuation lifts or evacuation elevators, depending on which side of the pond you are, which are a practical measure which enables people that can’t or might have difficulty in moving down the stairs and moving down the stairs. At another layer of the system, there’s something a bit more fundamental, which is what people call equitable fire safety. So it’s an idea that people who are finding their place of home, work or play in buildings like most of us, they’re afforded a different level of fire safety compared to other people, for example, socio economic grouping might cause, and is, the data illustrates quite you know, there’s, there’s clear connectivity between socio economic group and the level of fire safety, which, of course, is that should worry us. You know, that should really, that shouldn’t sit well with anyone, and then you bleed into other less well represented groups that may be afforded a lower level of fire safety, which, again, it simply shouldn’t sit well With us, as as practicing engineers, as as professionals and as leaders.
Mark McBride-Wright 19:45
So where do you Well, could you drill down a bit more then into who those groups might be that are afforded or that lower level
Benjamin Ralph 19:53
of protection? Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. There’s a. One particular group, that it’s positive because there is more of a discussion around these individual people, people that live in informal housing. And when, when people talk about informal housing, informal settlements, perhaps some people and some listeners today might be thinking about shanty towns on the edge of on the edge of large cities around the world, formed of, you know, corrugated metal and bits of plastic or something like that. And of course, those are informal settlements. But there are other there are other types of informal living that exist all over all over the world. For example, folk living and sleeping in tents, people that have moved into buildings which have been abandoned all sorts of different people, so that that’s a that’s one extreme edge of that scale. But of course, there are, there’s, there’s a whole spectrum with respect to that equitable fire safety. And you can easily imagine that housing, the, you know, the level of both physical fire safety measures, but also management, the quality of management, the quality of operation of of those physical fire safety elements and measures. You’ll see a Delta there, yeah, with respect to a you know, to take your example, there a super, super fancy condo. I’m making the assumption that you live in a super fancy condo down to something that isn’t quite that
Mark McBride-Wright 21:58
in the design process then, or working with, working with design teams on new builds or on retrofits, on brownfield facilities or existing buildings and renovation and what have you you know, what’s coming to my mind now is the Royal Institution of British architects, Rebus, you know, 10 stage design cycle process, how strong and prominent and embedded is your area of practice into that cycle. Because what I found when work that I’ve done on inclusive design before is that these considerations become a bit of an afterthought, or a bit too late in the chain, and then some of your degrees of freedom are sort of pinned down, and you’ve got less flexibility to do what you would have done had it been fully considered early on. So do you feel like the behavior in your peers and across the sector is now? It is fundamental, and it’s always considered, or sometimes it designs still pass through and you pick things up that shouldn’t be there at that stage in the design because there’s been a misunderstanding or lack of involvement earlier on in the in the design process. Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 23:18
I would say that I’ve witnessed there has been a change following the fire at Grenfell. That change isn’t probably consistent across every single individual actor within the vast, vast, extremely complicated industry of industries, which is the built environment, the fact that we don’t really know, you know, I’m using the phrase built environment, some people call it design and construction. Some people call it property. Some people, you know, there’s, we almost can’t even altogether agree on a name of what to call it. But what people do really recognize is that it’s not one industry. It’s lots of different industries all linked together in a very complicated way, and that complication is only getting one way as well. You know, supply chains are becoming more and more fragmented, and sub consulting to sub consulting to sub consulting, that sort of stuff. But yeah. So it’s important to think about that as the context, because in such a complicated and complex, interwoven overarching system, there’s a lot of inertia so things that are happening in part of that system aren’t necessarily going to be propagated through the entire system. So I think the that variation is still there definitely, and you might see that variation in in awareness, depending on the. Sector, perhaps, or the the size of organization, or the type of work that organization is doing. So I think there’s a long winded answer, really, of saying on a good day, I think people are thinking about it, and on a bad day, they’re still probably not thinking about it as much as you know, as as we might hope, what
Mark McBride-Wright 25:25
what could Is there anything that could be done cross sector or through collaboration between the institution of fire engineers, the institution of mechanical engineers, other professional engineering bodies? Is there anything that could be done to crystallize all this down into a really is the a really simple design methodology piece that, because where I find things often fall down in this, in these complex and complicated systems as you describe, is the fact that we all work in silos, and actually, we’re not the best as an industry at communicating and cross communicating. And so is there any combination of doing that well that I’ve just described, that you think might actually then make more actors in the space? Have it front of mind more frequently, is there, sort of like a cross engineering comms campaign or awareness raising initiative that that we should consider to try and make it more front of mind for more people? There
Benjamin Ralph 26:33
is? There’s definitely a lot of really good work happening, cross cross discipline, cross professional engineering institution and other professional institutions as well, lots of people dedicating a lot of time and effort and brain power and to try and solve these problems across the gamut of good practice, standard approaches To what does good look like? Look like from a competency perspective, the creation of new competency frameworks. And that’s that is good. I think that professional engineering institutions and other institutions that didn’t previously talk to each other are talking to each other more, which is fantastic. My observations are that, and definitely have been that when, and this is talking UK centric, there are events, conferences, workshops, organized by either industry organizations or the building safety regulator. For example, the new regulator, absolutely fantastic. Lots of really great collaboration and networking and the initialization of partnerships. My observation is that, of course, you start to see the same people, yeah, you know, the same people that are interested, the same people that care, the same people that are passionate and believe in it, and and then the risk in that, of course, is that it becomes not quite an echo chamber, but it just becomes a room of a couple 100 people really violently agreeing with each other. Yeah. So I think that there is, there’s something around the then all of that good work rippling further out. And I think that that communication could take lots of different forms. It definitely could be programs of formal communication and the building safety regulator are doing lots of work there. But it can simply be as well the people in that room going out and talking to colleagues, talking to their network, encouraging them into that room. I do definitely think that. The fact is, now, as part of the Building Safety Act, we have a new regulator called the building safety regulator, which sits within the Health and Safety Executive. And if there’s carrots and sticks, that’s the stick. Yeah, is the regulator, and I think that that will start to move the needle also
Mark McBride-Wright 29:27
on behavior. And I might be imagining this, but I think I remember seeing something on the Engineering Council website that the Engineering Council has taken responsibility, or convening responsibility for a set of like a competency framework, yes, yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 29:47
yeah, yeah. So relatively, relatively soon after the fire at Grenfell tower, it became apparent that competency was. Was a key, key issue. And everybody is relatively familiar about thinking, competency, skills, knowledge, experience and then behavior was very quickly folded into that. And then a working group, which is it initially started as it was called, the competency steering group. Later, the industry competency competency steering group was formed, spearheaded, really by the CIC and the CLC, lots of three letter three letter acronyms, and there were a number of working groups. For example, working group one engineers. Were the engineers, and then there were designers, there were building safety managers, there were contractors, there was a whole installers, whole whole bunch of people, and they went away to to collaboratively co create what good looks like with respect to competency. And you’re absolutely right that that working group one, which I sat on, working group one engineers were part of the convening group was the Engineering Council UK. So as of right now, we listeners might be familiar with the UK spec, so it’s a set of competencies that chartered engineers are measured against to be able to be registered as a chartered engineer. We now have a UK spec, HRB, high risk building, which is, you could think of it as a sort of a specialization bolt on level up. People initially were calling it ch star or CH plus. But it’s this idea. It’s a recognition that people that are working on residential buildings, tall residential buildings, which are very, very complicated beasts, may well need a higher level of competency compared to people not working on those types of buildings. It’s early days. It is early days. There’s a small number of professional engineering institutions which which can register chartered engineers. Yeah. So still, still a bit of a work in progress.
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
Amazing. Well, yeah, so I should say it’s so January 2025, to give a bit of a timestamp on this recording for for anyone listening to it, in the future, when some of these things have started to take root and have, hopefully have the intended impact that they’re designed to have. Looking at your profile, you, you have quite a bit of work in in academia as well. You’ve sort of had a research theme to your to your sort of expertise and to what you do. So just wanted to find out a bit more about about your your work there.
Benjamin Ralph 33:06
Yep, I carried out my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and my topic was related primarily to CFD based fire modeling, development of and experimentation that was carried out to validate the new capabilities of the CFD based fire modeling as part of the time I was at Edinburgh, there was a Really brilliant opportunity to go over to Washington, DC, and spent some time as a guest researcher at the national institution of Standards and Technology.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:48
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Benjamin Ralph 33:49
Who are the developers of a piece of software called Fire dynamic simulator, FDS, which is the most used CFD based fire model within the within the fire engineering discipline, yeah? Fantastic piece, fantastic tool, open source, collaborative, continuously, continuously integrated. Yeah, it was, yeah, absolutely fantastic opportunity to spend over there.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:23
And you did some you’ve done some work at Brunel University as well. I think there were some. Yep,
Benjamin Ralph 34:30
I was a visiting professor at Brunel for their undergraduate building services engineering, right course, yeah. And the intent behind that was to try and try and encourage the students to think about Fire Safety Engineering as part of their their one of their final major projects, which was a design building, building services, design of a building.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:59
So what, what role do you think academia plays in helping advance building safety, you know the sort of theory and the practice. Do you see students coming out with enough, enough of an understanding to then, when they’re doing what you did those years ago, graduate engineer, and they’re seeing graduate engineer come up. Do you feel like the system’s now priming the next generation with the right skills that they need for where the sector is at now? Yeah,
Benjamin Ralph 35:30
sure thing. There’s definitely, of course, there’s a two way feedback loop between what you could call academia and industry. Academia is creating new knowledge, creating new skilled individuals that feed into industry. And then industry are, you know, and I use the terms in their most broadest way, industry are coming up with the problems effectively. You know, these are the pain points. One thing worth talking about specifically is apprenticeships. So I’m an external examiner at Birmingham City University BCU, which is running a Fire Safety Engineering apprenticeship program, Bachelor of Engineering, bachelor’s of engineering program. And I think apprenticeships are a good way of putting those two groupings, those two interacting elements of academia and industry, closer together, whereby the students are out there, out and about, working on real real problems, real industry problems, on a day to day, hour to hour basis, and then going Back learning in a formal academic setting. And of course, there’s that can only be a good thing, that that connectivity, I think,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:10
yeah, definitely, definitely, it’s fun. Yeah, BCU and the work we’ve been doing at IFE district fire engineers like the Birmingham set University are also one of our the equal engineers university partners. So, yeah, brilliant, yeah. Probably need to have another conversation with you about triangulating some impact or something, overlap of opportunity that’s maybe there to coordinate
Benjamin Ralph 37:40
and as well, for me, another fantastic about, fantastic thing about apprenticeships is that it unlocks that level of education for a whole bunch of people that that could have just been Not, not a practical, practical choice at all. Yeah. So that’s absolutely, absolutely fantastic. It
Mark McBride-Wright 38:05
really helps with social mobility into the sector. Oh, yeah, and it’s a really great I mean, even if I look back on I sometimes wonder now if I would, if I were to start again, would I do what I did with the cost of education. Now, tertiary education, you know, to earn whilst you learn, as they say, with an apprenticeship. So long as I could get that feeling of meeting peers and being on almost like some apprenticeship programs are so large, aren’t they that? Well, actually, no. I mean, if universities are running you almost get the best of both. Then actually, don’t you get that university type feel, but you’re doing on apprenticeship, you know, meeting other people, like having peers, basically on your program?
Benjamin Ralph 38:53
Yeah, I am aware that some people like everything on a good day, something can be good. On a bad day, it can be less good. I’m aware that some people one critique of apprenticeships is that on a bad day, it could undermine the pure academic ness of the academic side of things. You know, students have this opportunity to this one shot at unfettered academic thought and freedom before they’re thrown into the real world. And you know all the nasty things that adults know everything about, tears into your academic utopia. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 39:41
Well, I think, I think there’s a halfway benefit. You know, one of the universities we worked at had an integrated year in industry, and it was mandatory in order to graduate. It wasn’t sort of, you go and do, I mean, I deliberately didn’t do it in period. Deal. Because if you wanted to do a year in industry, you have to, or you had to organize off your own accord, and then come back and then join the year that was below you. No way I’m doing that. I want to get I’ll do internships, you know, in the summer, but yeah, no way did I want to, like, see all my friends sort of finish a year,
Benjamin Ralph 40:21
you know, wearing their gowns 12 months before you that’s definitely
Mark McBride-Wright 40:25
the way I felt back then. But I’ve met a couple of engineers that did have that foresight, took that pause, went and did that, and then it just paid dividends for them in the early stages of their graduate career, because they’d already worked for a year. You know, they were familiar with workplace politics and because it’s a bit of an art sometimes, isn’t it to navigate in the corporate world?
Benjamin Ralph 40:50
Yeah, I would say that the some of the the younger engineers and graduate engineers that I meet at, for example, institution and mechanical engineers. Events blow me away with their their level of experience and insight into the industry as 2021 year olds, yeah, which gives me a lot of hope, yeah, yeah, or maybe I was just hanging out with all the wrong people when I was 21
Mark McBride-Wright 41:22
it’s up to us now to help bring these people in the sector and make sure they feel included and they’re supported as they come in, and we can impart that knowledge and wisdom, but also be open to challenge, because it’s a two way street as well. You know, like maybe the next generation are learning things in a way that, I mean, I was on a webinar yesterday. It’s a safety engineering working group, and they were talking, we were talking about developing, it was my first time in the meeting, and they were talking about developing webinars for this and webinars for that. And someone mentioned that maybe it’s not the best forum for imparting information to the next generation of engineers that are coming in who are all sort of Tiktok centered and just the top information needing access. I’m like that. That’s not a small issue. That’s quite a big issue, because you’re about to in all this effort to create knowledge, generate knowledge, capture knowledge, and then produce it into something that isn’t going to be looked at, you know. So I really do think there need, I guess that that was one of my thoughts I was having when I asked the question about communications. You know, I think one of the things we need to do better as a sector is meeting the future talent where it’s at and coming and finding them and communicating to them in the way that they’re used to consuming content. I think that’s one of the things we’re sort of missing a trick on, and probably is negatively affecting the potential that talent attraction could have to the sector. We’re just not selling it in the right way or through the right the right forums. You know what one of the engineers who won our engineering graduate of the Year category at the engineering talent awards, Mohammed Tahir, he now runs his own company called the airport guy, and his his videos showing behind the scenes at Heathrow Airport have had millions of
Benjamin Ralph 43:29
Yeah, including me, I’ve seen them,
Mark McBride-Wright 43:31
yeah. He now does consultancy work for brands that want to attract Gen Z. And you know, you see these highly over styled corporate videos that the people commissioning them like with all the fancy cutaways and soft music playing, and they don’t get watched. They only get watched by those what actually people want is access through the phone to see what it’s like on the job there and then. So I think he did some work with British Airways, and they are there for their early career program, and the videos that they produced through him led to something like 50 to 70% of their graduate applications, apprentice applications, and then they won an award at some recruitment industry award forum. So, you know, I think that his style is an example of the sort of style that, on a mass scale we should be looking at for, you know, for for some sort of traction, tragic. Now, it’s today that the Supreme Court in the US have just said that they’re going to ban tick tock and yeah, so who knows whether or not tick tock will even still exist over here in the US after this episode recording, yeah, in the weeks to come. But oh,
Benjamin Ralph 44:49
Little Red Book Now, as I understand it, red note, red
Mark McBride-Wright 44:54
note, yeah, yeah. This other night, I haven’t looked into that. I’m glad. I’m just glad I didn’t invest too much time. Been growing a Tiktok forward. Hopefully LinkedIn will stay fine. Okay, quick fire questions, I just realized the word fire in that quick fire question, very good. Okay, what’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on, and why I
Benjamin Ralph 45:18
had the opportunity to work on a building called the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Center in Melbourne, Australia, which was a 1.5 billion Aussie dollar research treatment teaching facility. And probably the most exciting thing about it is that it had a particle collider in the basement.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:46
Who has been the biggest influence on your career? What did you learn from them?
Benjamin Ralph 45:52
At the risk of giving a bit of a try to answer, my dad, my father, who is and still is a practicing structural and civil engineer. So that’s where I learned, you know, that’s, that’s where I saw, found engineering. So he was the introduction to engineering, the engineering practice, and I still to this day learn things from him, with respect to client care and engineering professionalism.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:26
If you can improve one aspect of building safety overnight, what would it be?
Benjamin Ralph 46:33
I think I’d go to fire safety equality. Yeah, I think the the inequality that we see with respect to fire safety afforded to different groups, should should worry a lot of people.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:51
What’s the one book or resource every fire safety professional should read?
Benjamin Ralph 46:56
Easy one, an introduction to fire dynamics by Professor Dougal dryersdale, who worked at the University of Edinburgh. Perhaps I’m biased, and it’s widely known as the people call it the Bible, the fire science Bible.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:16
What’s the one book or resource every that one What advice would you give to someone just starting in Fire Safety Engineering?
Benjamin Ralph 47:26
It would be, get out and about. Get out to workshops, conferences, CPD, events, meet, meet the folks that are there. Network, widely.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:41
Great advice. How do you stay motivated and inspired in such a challenging and technical field
Benjamin Ralph 47:50
with difficulty? Joking, for me, I think you have to. I was listening to a podcast the other day about burnout and the risk factors for burnout, and of course, there’s there’s volume, and there’s difficulty and there’s but the conclusion of the guest on the works on the podcast was that if you haven’t got support from colleagues and friends, that’s the one key risk factor. So yeah, with respect to me staying motivated and inspired, it has to be the people around me, colleagues, friends and family.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:30
Yeah, burnout. That’s another fire analogy. There, just making these connections. Now, it’s quite, quite ingrained in our language, isn’t it, what’s the most misunderstood aspect of fire safety in the built environment?
Benjamin Ralph 48:46
A probably a bit of a silly one, is the what you could think of as the Hollywood fallacy of sprinklers. When one sprinkler goes off, every single sprinkler head operates within a building which isn’t the case.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:04
I’m glad you clarified that, because I thought that was the case build. If you could work on any landmark building, past or present, what would it be and why
Benjamin Ralph 49:16
there is a property in the City of London, 41 cloth Fair, which is the only, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only building which survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, so I’d love to work on that building. And, of course, heritage buildings, from a fire safety perspective, extremely challenging, but from an engineering perspective, lots to get your teeth into.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:48
What’s the one skill you believe is essential for the next generation of fire engineers?
Benjamin Ralph 49:55
So I think two years ago, I’d probably say coding. I. But within a context of where we are generative AI and the help with respect to coding that generative AI can give, I probably wouldn’t say coding, and I’d say either data science abroad, a broad awareness and understanding of data science or complexity science, probably.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:21
And what’s your one what’s your proudest professional achievement today?
Benjamin Ralph 50:29
Hard to pick one, really, I am. I feel proud about what we’re doing at Hollis at the minute, with respect to providing integrated, practical fire safety solutions that that sit aligned with or weave together other broader project objectives, like decarbonization, like repositioning of assets like upgrade, like retrofit,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:02
amazing tea or coffee. Tea. And are you an early morning person or an evening person?
Benjamin Ralph 51:16
Evening for sure. No hesitation there. Evening for sure. Brilliant.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:20
Well, thank you very much. Ben, it’s been really good. Really enjoyed chatting to you. I’ve got loads more that I could have asked, but, yeah, no, I think it’s a really interesting area of of engineering. In fact, we haven’t even spoken about the fires that have been happening in Los Angeles the time of this recording. It just, it just goes to demonstrate that the risk is there with with fire, but if managed rightly, with the right systems, with the right professionals behind every design and every project, you know, we can live in a safe world. And the world is ever changing around us. So a career in fire engineering will always be a career in fire engineering, actually, isn’t it? It’s one of those, one of those careers that you say, well, we’ll always need fire engineers.
Benjamin Ralph 52:08
I believe. So, yeah, I believe so, yeah. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Mark. Really enjoyed
Mark McBride-Wright 52:14
it. So if people want to get in touch with you, how do they find out more about your work?
Benjamin Ralph 52:18
Yeah, sure thing. Go ahead and look me up on LinkedIn. Send me a request, send me a message,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:27
perfect. Well, we’ll put the link to your profile in the show notes in the transcript. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Ben, catch up soon.
Benjamin Ralph 52:35
Cheers. Marks. Take it easy. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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