Join us for the NCN-SFPE Annual Seminar on April 17, 2025
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM (PST)
Location: Hayward City Hall, 777 B St, Hayward, CA 94541
Agenda:
8:00 - 8:30am Breakfast
8:30 - 8:45am Welcome remarks
8:45 - 9:45am Advances in Smoke Control Design, James Milke, PhD, PE
9:45 - 10:45am Significant changes to the 2025 CBC/CFC Chapter 9, Sagiv Weiss-Ishai, PE
10:45 - 11:00am Break
11am - 12pm Building Resilience: A Collaborative Framework for Mitigating Wildfire Impacts on Communities, Erica Fischer, PhD, PE
12:00 - 1:30pm Lunch and Networking
1:30 - 2:30pm Design Fires, James Milke, PhD, PE
2:30 - 2:45pm Break
2:45 - 3:45pm New Code Provisions for Tall Timber Structures in California, Chelsea Drenick, SE
3:45 - 4:00pm Scholarship announcements
4:00 - 5:00pm Advancing Fire Modeling for Hazard and Risk Assessment in the Wildland-Urban Interface, Maria Theodori, PE
5:00 - 7:00pm Happy Hour (sponsored by H. R. Kirkland and Radix Wire and Cable)
Hosted by the Northern California-Nevada Chapter of SFPE.
Proceeds from this seminar will benefit the Chapter Scholarship Fund for fire protection engineering students.
Advances in Smoke Control Design, Dr. James Milke, University of Maryland, College Park
The presentation will provide an overview of how the design of smoke control systems has changed over the years. Examples of recent changes in NFPA 92 include open vs. closed doors for stairwell pressurization systems and analyses for make-up air and tenability in systems for atria. In addition, the presentation will include recently compiled information on leakage rates of building components that are part of the analysis in stairwell pressurization systems and specification of design fires which is required for the analysis of atrium systems.
In addition, there will be a short discussion of a new initiative starting in Fall 2025 at the University of Maryland that makes available Fire Protection Engineering undergraduate courses via an online delivery mode.
Design Fires, Dr. James Milke, University of Maryland, College Park
This presentation will discuss the process of selecting design fire scenarios (DFS). This will expand on research completed in 2022 for the SFPE Foundation which outlined performance- based techniques and sources of data to support the process. Discussion will include how a long list of possible fire scenarios can be reduced to a lesser number of design fire scenarios for analysis. The presentation will also include challenges and gaps related to the probabilistic nature of design fire scenarios and for fuel properties related to the ignition source.
Significant changes to the 2025 CBC/CFC Chapter 9 – Fire Protection Systems, Sagiv Weiss-Ishai, San Francisco Fire Department
The CA State Fire Marshal (CSFM) has recently completed the 2025 amendments to the 2024 International Fire Code (IFC ). The NEW 2025 CA Fire Code (CFC) will be published on July 1st, 2025 and become effective in CA on 1/1/2026. This presentation will discuss and clarify the significant changes in the 2025 CFC - Chapter 9 - Fire Protection Systems, between the previous 2022 CFC supplement of July 1st, 2024 and the 2024 IFC.
New Code Provisions for Tall Timber Structures in California, Chelsea Drenick, Woodworks
As awareness of mass timber’s potential for tall wood structures has grown, there has been a push among U.S. building designers to achieve greater heights with these materials. Initially, tall wood buildings in the U.S. were proposed using international examples as precedent, with a project-specific performance-based design approach used. However, a uniform set of tall wood code provisions is in effect in many States with adoption of the 2021 International Building Code (IBC), which allows up to 18 stories of mass timber construction. The 2022 California Building Code (CBC) has also been adopted based on the new IBC provisions, but with California specific modifications. This presentation will introduce the new IBC and CBC tall wood code provisions, as well as the technical research and testing that supported their adoption.
Advancing Fire Modeling for Hazard and Risk Assessment in the Wildland-Urban Interface, Maria Theodori, University of California, Berkeley
Structure ignition and fire spread in urban areas, driven by exposure to extreme wildfires, have caused devastating impacts in recent decades. To implement effective mitigation measures and reduce losses, it is critical to understand potential fire behavior and assess the risks associated with structure ignition during such events. However, current operational wildland fire simulation tools treat urban areas as non-burnable, which can lead to underestimated risk when fires reach developed areas—where, under conducive conditions, escalation into large-scale urban conflagrations is possible. In California, Fire Hazard Severity Zones, which guide building code requirements, are based on these limited models and can misclassify hazards, increasing community vulnerability. The January 2025 Eaton Fire in Los Angeles underscored this gap, demonstrating the urgent need for advanced methods that incorporate urban fire dynamics. This presentation introduces a physics-based wildland-urban fire model capable of simulating structure-to-structure fire spread within existing modeling frameworks. A new set of building fuel model inputs are defined with associated fire performance characteristics to capture real-world urban fuel distributions. Applications of this model will be demonstrated alongside other wildfire hazard and risk analysis methods, using case studies from both research and industry. Attendees will gain insight into tools and data that support the evolving role of fire protection engineers in addressing the urban fire crisis.
Building Resilience: A Collaborative Framework for Mitigating Wildfire Impacts on Communities, Erica Fischer, PhD, PE
Understanding and mitigating the impacts of natural hazards on human communities is complex due to the increasing interconnectedness of the global economy, increasing incidence and severity of climate-related natural hazards, and dependencies among infrastructure systems. Wildfires are increasing in intensity and frequency throughout the world. Addressing the cumulative effects of wildfires, including those on social and economic systems, crosses disciplines and jurisdictional boundaries and requires collaboration among social, economic, and technical sectors. This presentation will summarize a new framework to prepare for wildfires and examine wildfire hazards throughout the community, identify plausible effects on physical, social, and economic infrastructure with different characteristics. This framework can inform decisions about spatially explicit mitigation of the risks posed by wildfires within the built environment and the wildland.
