Fire Safety in Commercial Premises - CPD Event

Speaker : Mike Burroughs MSc MA BSc (Hons) FIFireE MIAAI ACIEA

Fire Investigations (UK) LLP

www.fireinvestigationsuk.com

(see speaker biography below)

Date : Tuesday 22nd January 2019

Time : Registration and sandwiches from 12pm

CPD event 12.15pm – 2.15pm

Venue : The Topsham Room, EG&CC

Learning Objectives :

1. To understand what lessons can be learned from history
2. To understand What is fire? How does it spread? How common is it?
3. To understand how fire behaves
4. To understand how people behave when confronted by fire
5. To learn about Fire safety law in England and Wales - where does it apply, who is responsible and what must they do?

Speaker Biography :

Mike is a Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers and a Member of the International Association of Arson Investigators. He holds a Master of Science, with distinction, in Fire Investigation and won the Gardiner Award for his dissertation on the ignition characteristics and heat release rate of tea light candles. Mike also holds a Master of Arts degree in Professional Development in Management; his dissertation investigated using Six Sigma management techniques to help reduce casualties and fatalities in dwelling fires. He was one of the first people outside DCLG to be granted access to the fire statistics database for every FRS in the UK.

Mike served as a fire officer for over thirty years specialising in fire investigation, fire safety law, technical standards and policy. Like every other fire officer he started as an operational firefighter and progressed to operational command. He has investigated many fatal fires, including multiple fatalities, domestic, industrial and agricultural fires of both accidental and deliberate origin. Mike has presented expert evidence to Crown Court, HM Coroner’s Court and Court Martial.

Mike sat on several national working groups including the Chief Fire Officers’ Association Timber Frame & Structural Timber, and Fire Engineering and Technical Standards groups as well being a critical member of the team of three that reviewed and redrafted all the letters and paragraphs sent under the Regulatory Reform (fire Safety) Order 2005 by all the Fire and Rescue Services in England and Wales. He has met and presented evidence to the Fire and Housing Ministers and the Chief Fire and Rescue Advisor, spoken to the All Party Fire Safety and Rescue Group at the House of Lords, and provided briefing papers to all MPs on the provision of smoke alarms in rented accommodation.

In September 2015 he presented a research paper at the 6th International Symposium on Human Behaviour in Fire. In 2016 he delivered a paper to the 14th International Conference on Fire Safety and Engineering, which attracted over 300 fire scientists from 33 different countries.

Mike continues to be active in fire science research and has a special interest in computational fluid dynamics and evacuation modelling. Mike’s first degree was in environmental science when he specialised in pollution chemistry particularly the migration and availability of heavy metals in soils. He was selected to represent Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service and had lunch with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth during her Jubilee year.