Designing fire safety into residential construction: perspectives, ideas, and trends
Description
Underwriters Laboratories (UL) is committed to life safety and to public education by which the world can be made a safer place to live and work. In partnership with the Phoenix Fire Department (PFD), UL and the PFD will host a two-day educational symposium in Phoenix, Arizona from 2-3 December 2009. The symposium's goal is to share ideas and foster discussion among interested parties who want to learn more and share ideas about designing fire safety into residential buildings in North America.
Topics covered in this symposium include:
- Overview of today’s residential fire environment
- Benefits of lightweight construction materials within residential building designs
- Scientific fire research results of testing lightweight construction materials
- Protection methods for lightweight construction materials used in home building
- Smoke characterization research and advances in smoke alarm technology
- Fire resistant building materials: properties and benefits
- The experience of selling and installing residential sprinklers
- Industry comparisons of safety initiatives
- The realtors’ perspective on fire safety solutions in the home
- Perspective of builders on home fire safety
- Additional topics related to home fire safety, including insurance and fire prevention
Participants will be offered opportunities to listen to panel discussions, share ideas with speakers, ask technical questions of scientists and researchers, compare and contrasts ideas on product safety from other industries, and complete a symposium effectiveness questionnaire. Participants will learn how they can support fire safety initiatives in residential home construction by designing and building low cost fire safety building components into residential buildings. Social events will be held both evenings of the symposium for all participants and will allow for informal discussions, sharing of ideas, and furthering of development of ideas toward residential fire safety.
Guest speakers will likely represent organizations including architectural firms and associations, insurers, building product manufacturers, fire service, fire safety leadership from around the country, fire research experts, and wood products and structural building components associations.
Objectives
The success of the symposium will be judged by the ability of all participants to share positive discussions at the symposium, foster professional relationships that extend beyond the symposium, and carry residential fire safety concepts into a new direction as core offerings in the design of homes built by home builders.
UL University's workshops are designed for and intended to serve individuals using and relying upon UL services. UL University reserves the right to limit workshop attendance strictly to the foregoing. In addition, UL University reserves the right to change, reschedule or cancel any workshop at any time. UL shall not be responsible for any consequential or other losses resulting from the cancellation or postponement of this workshop such as airline and other travel/personal expenses.