EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains descriptions and video that readers may find disturbing. As young partygoers rang in the New Year at a packed bar in the Swiss Alps, the celebrating quickly turned ...

Abstract: The rising incidence of fires calls for advanced training methodologies that surpass the limitations of traditional firefighter training, both in scale and scope. Virtual Reality (VR) ...

Whether or not we respond to climate change – and the security implications of that decision – is a major public policy question. But increasingly experts are paying closer attention to how we respond ...

It was a cool November night in the fall of 1988. I was a battalion chief for a large suburban fire department in the Sacramento, Calif., area. My battalion was very urbanized and the largest in the ...

Every fire sends out signals that can assist firefighters in determining the stage of fire development and, most importantly, the changes that are likely to occur. This skill is essential to ensuring ...

To this point, we have examined the extreme fire behavior phenomena of flashover and backdraft. Flashover, transition of a compartment fire from growth to fully developed stage, is a heat driven event ...

A backdraft involves deflagration or rapid combustion of hot pyrolysis products and flammable products of combustion upon mixing with air. Several conditions are necessary in order for a backdraft to ...