Fire safety is a tough “product” to sell because the best outcome looks like nothing happened. That’s exactly why we sat down with Birgitte Messerschmidt (NFPA) to talk about communicating fire science to politicians, regulators, grant bodies, and other people in positions of power who can approve policies, permits, and funding, often with only a few minutes to spare. We share what changes when your audience is nontechnical, busy, and sometimes driven by incentives that do not neatly match engineering logic.

We get practical about preparation: mapping who actually holds the decision power, building an elevator speech, and using storytelling so your message sticks. We also unpack the role of media and “sensation” in shaping political priorities, using electric vehicle fire headlines as a real example. Instead of amplifying fear, we talk about framing the issue as a changing fire landscape: new materials, tighter buildings, batteries, and evolving hazards that demand updated fire safety engineering.

Then we go into the hard parts: how experts can get pulled into political fights, how soundbites get cherry-picked, and when the right move is to say less, not more. We also tackle ethical communication after tragedies, focusing on respect for victims and clear intent to prevent repeat losses. Finally, we wrestle with risk communication, why “it could happen” derails risk-based design, and how to acknowledge emotion while bringing people back to facts.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

A battery fire on a train is not “just another small fire.” When a lithium-ion battery in an e-scooter or e-bike fails, the rail car can behave like a long pipe that moves smoke fast, limits escape options, and compresses decision-making into minutes.

We sit down with Adam Barowy from UL Research Institutes FSRI to unpack new full-scale passenger rail car burn tests using real micro-mobility devices and realistic storage locations. We talk through what thermal runaway looks like before flames, why that venting phase is a crucial warning sign, and what changes once flaming ignition starts. Adam shares the data that surprised even seasoned fire researchers: smoke can spread from one end of the car to the other in about 30 seconds after flaming ignition, floor-level visibility can collapse in roughly two to three minutes, and toxic exposure can become a serious egress limiter on the same timescale as train stopping and evacuation.

We also zoom out to the operational and societal reality. Rail operators want to support first mile last mile travel and riders who depend on e-mobility for work, yet they need policies that actually reduce risk. We cover practical options like limiting device size, avoiding carriage in the first or last car when exits are constrained, improving passenger education, requiring battery safety certifications, and exploring segregation strategies that keep devices away from passengers without pushing the problem underground.

I promised you links, so here they are:

• Summary of the research on trains and batteries
• The full report
• Li-Ion battery safety guide

Cover image created from pictures from their report linked above! Following Adam's recommendation and taking your resources for a creative spin :)

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode of fire fundamentals we sit down with Professor Simo Hostikka from Aalto University to cover radiation in fires, both from the angle of physical phenomena and ways to model it. In this episode we cover following topics:

• feel less mysterious, from blackbody basics and role of radiation actually does inside the CFD N-S equation.
• Spectrum and emissivity to real engineering outcomes like heat flux, tenability
• Radiation’s two roles in fire CFD: target heat flux and the gas energy source term
• Emission versus absorption and why Kirchhoff’s law is spectral, not just a single number
• Spectrum intuition using Planck, Wien’s law, and why T to the fourth explodes heat flux
• View factors as a hazard mental model for layers, panels, and distance effects
• Why gases are strongly non-gray while soot often looks smooth and easier to approximate
• How FDS uses the finite angle method, why 104 directions exists, and how updates are staged in time, how to manage spatial and temporal resolution of the radiation
• Ray effect and numerical diffusion, when you can see the error and when you cannot
• Other radiation models such as Monte Carlo, and when they are worth it.
  
  

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.