WELCOME

This is the third annual Canadian Consulting Engineer dedicated to the National Fire Protection Association’s annual spring congress — this year held in Baltimore.

Though all the articles in this special issue relate to fire and life safety, we hope they have a broad enough appeal to interest Canadian consulting engineers in other disciplines. The lead feature, for example, talks about the major infrastructure program going on in the Vancouver area to prepare the region to cope in the aftermath of an earthquake. Civil engineering firms have been involved in this program in various ways over the past decade. They have, for example, being doing seismic upgrading of bridges and reservoirs to ensure that if disaster should strike there will be enough water to fight the inevitable fires and a transportation system that won’t totally collapsed.

Another article, “Accidents iin Waiting?” by Professor B. Stimpson of the University of Manitoba Faculty of Engineering (reprinted with permission of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Manitoba) should interest anyone who travels by air. Professor Stimpson’s essay on the Valujet 592 disaster in 1996 discusses the question of whether our increasing reliance on highly sophisticated and interrelated technology systems is almost bound to lead to snowballing effects and disasters.

Bronwen Ledger

Managing Editor