FireGrid: Integrated emergency response and fire safety engineering for the future built environment

Analyses of disasters such as the Piper Alpha explosion (Sylvester-Evans and Drysdale, 1998), the World Trade Centre collapse (Torero et al, 2002, Usmani et al, 2003) and the fires at Kings Cross (Drysdale et al, 1992) and the Mont Blanc tunnel (Rapport Commun, 1999) have revealed many mistaken decisions, such as that which sent 300 fire-fighters to their deaths in the World Trade Centre. Many of these mistakes have been attributed to a lack of information about the conditions within the fire and the imminent consequences of the event. E-Science offers an opportunity to significantly improve the intervention in fire emergencies. The FireGrid Consortium is working on a mixture of research projects to make this vision a reality. This paper describes the research challenges and our plans for solving them.