The Firehouse Yak: Adam Barowy – The Latest on FSRI’s Electric Vehicle Fire Research
For the last few years, electric vehicle (EV) fires have made national news headlines because of the unique and unknown challenges they present to firefighters, leading UL Research Institute’s Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI) to launch a research effort to understand the mitigation and safety concerns.
Adam Barowy, a principal research engineer with FSRI, details the three-year effort to document EV fires and help fire departments develop operating guidelines as well as raise awareness to firefighter health and safety concerns. He explains the steps that FSRI took to conduct test burns, what stakeholders were involved and the processes in which they conducted test burns.
Barowy and Peter Matthews discuss the tactics needed, along with research findings on EV fire blankets, plus concerns for life safety when vehicles are burning inside occupied structures. The two discuss the impacts of the smoke on firefighter health and what impacts the smoke has on PPE.
While completing the report, FSRI developed an EV Fire Tactical Decision Aid that provides responding firefighters with a look at tactics and guides decisions during EV fire emergencies.
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About the Author
Peter MatthewsPeter Matthews
Editor-in-Chief
Adam BarowyAdam Barowy
Adam Barowy is a lead research engineer at UL's Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI). In nine years of commercial fire research prior to joining FRSI, he worked to develop UL standards and test methods and evaluated emerging fire hazards and new and innovative fire protection solutions. Barowy advanced UL’s capabilities for characterizing the thermal, fire and explosion hazards of energy storage technologies and led the technical development of UL 9540A and UL’s large-scale ESS fire testing program. Prior to UL, he worked at National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he conducted full-scale structure fire field experiments to enable improved firefighting tactics, reconstructed LODD/injury fire incidents and evaluated firefighting equipment. Barowy volunteered with the Amherst, MA, Fire Department while he pursued his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He later graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Master of Science in fire protection engineering.