Seminar 8 - Sustainability - Ted Simmonds - Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Facilities, Faculty of Science
Notes
Professional or Technician
In QLD, if you are not a registered professional engineer, it is an offence to claim (or allow self to be claimed) to be or to carry out professional engineering services - Maximum penalty: 1000 penalty units ($143,750.00) Professional Engineering
Sustainable Practices
Sustainable Practices has 6 sections that are used to solve Sustainable Practices.
- Contribute to building a sustainable society, present, and future.
- Apply professional and responsible judgement and take a leadership role.
- Do more than just comply with legislation and codes. Be prepared to challenge the status quo
- Use resources efficiently and effectively.
- Seek multiple views to solve sustainability challenges
- Manage risk to minimise adverse impact and maximise benefit to people and the environment.
Combustible Cladding
74AB - What is a building product and a non-conforming building product?
(1) A building product is any material or other thing associated with, or that could be associated with, a building. (2) A building product is a non-conforming building product for an intended use if- (a) the association of the product with a building for the intended use if- (i) is not, or will not be, safe, or (ii) does not, or will not, comply with the relevant regulatory provision, or (b) the product does not perform, or is not capable of performing, for the use to the standard it is represented to perform by or for a person in the chain of responsibility for the product.
Top Tips
- Be humble and ready to be constantly learning. This is a trained mindset, not a natural state of being.
- Communication is a major part of being an engineer. That includes anticipating how you will communicate now with future generations.
- Get comfortable with navigating ambiguity and not having a ‘firm’ answer. These are the questions your clients are paying you to solve.
Audio Transcription
Particular room, you’re gonna bang into a lot of stuff. That’s exactly what a firefighter is experiencing, and you’ve gotta recognize that they’re experiencing that on the clock, they’ve got about four, I think it’s something like 40 minutes of air, maybe a little bit less in their tank on the back. And if they get disorientated and stuck, guess what happens when that runs out?
They’ve got no air, they’re gonna asphyxiate like anybody in this space. Right, and that is a very, very serious consequence sometimes of these decisions that are made through the code or through to choice. In engineering design, it’s a classic in your not so high rise buildings around your eight stories and below that you won’t actually have a stair pressurization system.
All that system does is keep smoke out of the stairwell. It’s great for getting people out, but if you then I suppose, take a bit of cost savings and decide once other people out, that’s fine. But that’s the same stairwell that fire brigade go up into. If that gets compromised. They have to set up their breathing apparatus and their operations from the ground floor.
Probably takes them about 10 minutes to climb up those stairs with all of that gear. They’ve maybe got a 10, 15 minutes to address it in the room. If they can’t get on top of that fire, they’ve gotta come back down. But if that’s now smoke lock that stairwell, they’re in really, really serious. And again, no one wants a firefighter’s life on their hands, right?
Or death on their hands. I should say. Not only that, but think of the societal impacts if we start losing firefighters here, there, and everywhere because we’ve taken the cheaper option when it comes to our buildings. Not to mention, I suppose, the fact that if you’ve got a fire that you can’t put out, without putting firefighters lives at risk, they won’t put it out.
Now, if there happen to be a warehouse full of rubber ties or various other disgusting toxins, right at the Port of Brisbane. Think of the environmental impact of just letting a huge building like that just dispel all of its, um, waste product into the Brisbane River that can affect an entire, uh, agricultural and marine ecosystem.
Actually, it’s one that I turned up to was a similar situation like that, but I won’t go into it. Um, for this particular one, that’s why it’s important to think about your boundary conditions for your. So it’s one of the most important choices you get to make. So I’m just checking the time making show I’m not blabbering on forever.
Um, boundary conditions is one of those things an engineer gets to set. It’s part of their professional practice and it’s where you need to impose the leadership portion of your sustainability. You go, that’s great that this is the scope of the project that you want to give me. Bear in mind if you want me to decide that I have to also consider this.
Do not sort of pretend. That I get to put an imaginary line there, and that’s the end of it, unless you let me make choices on your behalf, which makes that a reality. This is a classic for that. Details are right next to each other right on top of each other. Okay? So by doing that and then building it out of combustible materials, whether they realize it or not, they’ve made a choice to be in it or one for all sort of type thing.
If one of these houses goes up, it’s all going. Now if that’s actually been the case of say, one person’s decision and then the next person’s decision without realizing it, they impacted each other and that’s not what you want to do. You’ve now exceeded your boundary conditions or made choices that have impacts beyond your sphere of control.
So that’s been, I would categorize that as either a missed opportunity or a poor engineering decision, which is why some of you, does anyone live in a townhouse here? I used to, but not. Yep. You probably notice that that wall between you and the next townhouse, bloody thick, bloody thick, concrete. That’s because that’s the decision that’s been made to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Don’t build that thing outta timber. We need this to be its own discreet little fire and its own little bombshell. If something happens in that space, it’s that space’s problem and not next doors. Same thing happens with houses who lives in a house. In the suburbs or whatever. Yep. You’ll notice that you’re not probably right up on the fence.
That is another fire safety decision that’s being made that says do not go within 1.5 meters or two meters of your boundary fence and your neighbor’s not allowed to do the same either. That’s cuz if you’ve got one of these hundred 30 year old Queenslanders that’s got 130 years worth of probably, um, petroleum based.
Um, varnish or something like that on it. It’s gonna go like crazy. That’s gonna be a big fire, but we’ve placed it far enough away from its neighbors that it shouldn’t cause spontaneous combustion in the next one. The kind of thing that gives confidence to firefighters that they go, our tactics are appropriate to then to those engineering decisions.
Cause we’ve trained ourselves to, first and foremost, and speaking us as if I was still. First, rescue second, uh, exposures. So that’s the sort of where you then go when you’re trying to protect, um, particular, uh, fire fronts that are coming out. C containment. So that’s when you’re getting around. So this is rescue, the acronym working on C is the containment.
So that’s get around it and keep it to a contained size and work our way in. Then there’s e extinguishment over overhaul, which is basically going through the thing and tearing into bits and make sure there’s not a scrap of heat left in that structure. But what the point I’m trying to illustrate is that if your engineering choice has meant that actually, if they don’t do containment and exposures first, they’ve now got an outta control fire.
You’ve forced their hand and their subsequent decision to abandon rescue and they will not like doing that. Right? So you’re not gonna have a very happy fiber. Or what could happen isn’t that they know someone’s in there. They take that risk anyway, and it results in a whole bigger societal impact.
There’s the other subsequent victims, you’re exposing firefighter to unnecessary risk. And this is where the societal impact starts bleeding through, right? Is that you’re gonna get people who start feeling really uncomfortable in their own neighborhoods if they think that actually soon someone leaves the toaster on the whole suburb’s going up.
You’re really, really nervous.
There’s solutions to these kind of things, but sometimes they’re well intended, but ultimately the outcome is a bit poor. This is one of them, a f I think it’s called aqueous firefighting foam or something like that. Basically, it’s this fantastic product that when you’ve got a really nasty petrochemical, like fine, which water will just spread, it’ll just cause it to spread because the, the chemical sits on top and just sort of like goes fly.
Says something else on fire, you throw this stuff at it and it just sits on top of that smothers. It goes out brilliant. You can see these firefighters are being particularly liberal with their application with a bed, and they’re not the only ones. They absolutely throw this stuff around like crazy.
Cause the thing about a pool fire is that a thousand liters is a really big area when it only has to be that deep. So that’s a, that’s a big fire. That means that’s a big subsequent response with your phone. Great for an immediate safety impact. But what they didn’t realize, or whoever was the product designer or the engineer behind some of this is realize what the latent impacts would be.
Latent impacts, including contaminating the soil to the point where it was unhealthy to be around those sites, potentially contaminating the water table, potentially contaminating these individuals who are using it a lot and causing cancer to disproportionately grow. This is the kind of staff that is the less fun side of engineering.
When you realize the choices you’ve made can actually affect people’s lives, even when you’ve got a good outcome. So in my discipline, once you’ve presume that a firefighter is turning up, you’re presuming a degree of exposure to some of these nasty things. Whether you like it or not, you’re contributing to the fact that they are hugely more likely to get cancer than.
In society. I’ve got family in the fire service. So that was never a fun one for me. But it’s just one of those things that you deal with and you recognize that this is then when the societal response to that as well, we don’t want the engineers to stop doing what they’re doing cause we like the choices that they’re making.
We want to make sure that the firefighters continue to go in cause we like what they’re doing. So that’s when they met the compromise and now firefighters get basically, and no questions asked. Payer when it comes to cancer development later in their career. Cause it’s presumed to be. So that’s, that’s I suppose an example for me of when actually sustainable settings or sustainability settings are actually there, is that you’re actually exposing people to things that will harm them.
It’s known. But that’s the point. It’s known. You’re able to clearly articulate to each other what the consequences are, that why you’re doing a certain thing. We want, we don’t want over-engineer this building or get built and the economy has to stop. Likewise, we, it’s so safe that it’s, it’s excessive. And then this is the way we, we reconcile those things as a community.
Should this one. So that’s why I suppose I just wanted to leave with you my top tips. So if you’ve gotta be a professional engineer, uh, and I suppose if you link your ethics to your profession, to your job and your personal ethics, how you reconcile these is be humble. Um, which is not the easiest thing to do as a professional and be ready to be constantly learning a little bit easier.
It’s the kind of reason that you get people like us.