Fun With Fire Protection

In October, Swiss Re's (Zurich; total assets of $215 billion) Global Asset Protection Services partnered with Underwriters Laboratories (UL; Northbrook, Ill.) to host the Second Annual Fire Prevention Forum for commercial property and casualty risk managers. The forum is aimed at helping risk managers understand some of the tools available to them, such as fire modeling, actual delivered density and commodity classification testing, and natural catastrophe simulation, so that they may take steps in protecting their company's assets from the risk of fire.

"Risk managers are not really aware of all of the tools available today in the industry to help them make informed decisions. Large-scale fire testing can actually simulate fire protection arrangements in real-life situations," says Timothy Heinze, product and field operations leader of the global asset protection services business unit of Swiss Re.

The conference included an assessment of the fire-protection capabilities of different storage and office environments, and sprinkler systems, through the use of live, large-scale fires within a UL testing facility and predictive fire modeling software, such as The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (Gaithersburg, Md.) Fire Dynamics Simulator. --M.W.