Innovation - Spring 2024

FEATURE

mechanical ventilation—they’re all factors that can be optimized from building to building.”

Creek wildfire alone. “In recent years, we have really had more and more prevalent wildland fires,” said Ager. “I think it’s essential to see some integration between these risks.” However, under extreme conditions like wildfires, experts consider most buildings equally vulnerable. “Every building still has its failure modes. Performance really depends on the fire itself and the land you’re situated on,” said Ager. Designing buildings at the edge of wildlands, then, primarily depends on other affordances such as creating sufficient amounts of buffer space in between houses and trees. Ager recently consulted on a proposal for a tall commercial building at the wooded edge of a city, and ultimately contributed structural risk mitigation measures that pertained to ease of evacuation, and compartmentation. “It’s not just one thing,” he said. “Sprinklers, fire separation,

Some of that degradation will be unexpected, he said, and might lead to disproportionate amounts of fire or even loss of life. “At that point, we’ll look back and say, ‘we should change what we’re doing now,’” he said. “We won’t know until it’s proven by time.” Although the number of mass timber buildings is growing substantially, especially in BC, mass timber construction still only makes up about one percent of new construction in North America. “We’ve been pretty conservative, historically, on timber and fire conditions,” said Carla Dickof, head of research and design at Fast + Epp, “particularly in modern construction, where sprinklers are very present in all of these buildings. A lot of these provisions were put together when we didn’t have the systems that we have in place now for controlling fires.” Though they largely agree that endorse tall mass timber buildings wholeheartedly. “I would say I’m ‘pro-mass timber buildings,’ but I’m also pro-taking time to figure things out,” said Wiesner. For reference, Engineers and Geoscientists BC has guidelines available: AIBC-EGBC Joint Professional Practice Guidelines - Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction Up To 12 Storeys V1.0 traditional height limitations have been conservative, Ager and Wiesner are hesitant to

Time is best test for mass timber safety

Though assessing the fire safety risk of a mass timber building is complex, there has been one inarguable consequence of the debate: high insurance premiums. RBC reports that due to lack of data regarding the real-life fire safety performance of mass timber buildings, premiums can be six to 10 times higher than those of equivalent steel or concrete buildings. That’s because no number of lab tests can replicate the effectiveness of in-situ performance. “We’ll only know about the true safety risks in 10, 15 years,” Ager said. “All of the precautions—the fire sprinklers, everything else—are brand new. These mass timber buildings are at the safest the moment they’re built. Ten years later, the building will suffer from degradation.”

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Spring 2024

Innovation