Stage fire in Barcelona

Those lights certainly wouldn't be pointed in the same spot very long. The "blasphemous" EDM music of my generation being generally as fast and upbeat as it is would have those zipping around all over the place before anything got warm*

*Aside from the motors / fixtures themselves, those would get rather hot.

Van said:

I built a project that went into Wynn Casino in Macao. I was ASTOUNDED at the Fire retardant regulations and certifications I had to provide the Chinese government.

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That's interesting. I worked on a Cirque du Soleil show in Macau in 2008. Costumes near pyro. Some of the soft goods, not all of them. Cirque told me they were being cautious, and that Macau didn't make them do much or provide much by way of flame retardant treatment and documentation. The local people on the show were nice and very conscientious, and very much into treating and testing.

MNicolai said:

That's more interesting to me than what the cause of ignition was. That fire was self sustaining. With pyro involved, that all should've been built of out of non-combustible or flame retarded materials regardless of regulations or being an outdoor venue.

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Well, I believe they should have been non-combustible or flame retardant "in compliance with" regulations, as well as 'regardless of'. They were neither.

I'm wondering if the tests used to determine flame retardancy are even near the temperatures and pressures of pyro.

And then I recall the CEO of one of the legacy building code organizations and a very fine fire protection engineer referring to flame retardant treatments as one of the biggest frauds in codes.

It doesn't matter what the ignition temperature is. The goal is to keep items from continuing to burn on their own, that they are 'flame retardant': Pyro is a very intermittent heat and flame effect, compared to tests that materials are subjected to, which, depending on use, are either 45 seconds sustained flame, 10 minutes, and 30 minutes. FYI, the flame temperature of most of these tests are in the +/-3500F range. Some tests require a closed oven to increase the surrounding air to 1000F, with ample new air brought in to sustain the fire. There are thermo sensors within the testing unit to verify temperature. Seems somewhat higher than the outdoor, flowing air of this event, and the non-sustained temperature exposure of the pyro.

With that in mind, lab tests are not real world situations. In this situation, it seems that a lab test would maybe have been more rigorous.

Also, US codes for flame resistance aren't proscriptive any more, meaning they don't say 'items need to be flame retardant treated'. They say 'items need to meet these particular fire tests and specifications', and how you get there is not dictated by code.

The biggest issue in my experience with flame retardant treatments is that people use them improperly for things that the FR chemicals are not designed and tested for. Like today, people wanted to apply a flame retardant designed for polyester fabrics onto urethane foam that's applied to a wall. They not only have a mismatch in the FR chemical design vs. application, they also have the a mismatch in what testing and item usage the chemical had been tested to meet.

Something of a swerve but....
Long ago food service locations usually had wood topped tables and used wood cutting boards. Then solid surface cutting boards came into play. The NSF quickly adopted that as the desired standard. A food service professor at a university in I think Wisconsin decided to do some tests to come up with a stop gap measure to provide the best way to clean wooden cutting boards for smaller institutions who couldn't afford to change right away. His first test run was he thought a total disaster,
So he re tried his experiment several times. Still didn't give him the desired results. He found that wooden cutting boards PROPERLY scrubbed and sanitized were actually more sanitary than the solid surface ones. He thought it probably had something to do with the cellular structure of the materials. Wood has an open structure while the solid surface materials didn't allowing bacteria in the tiny crevices (from knife cuts) to live longer. Nowadays, the NSF suggests color-coded cutting boards that can be run a sanitizing dish machine. The board you use for fish is never used for chopping veggies.

I have heard that also. It has something to do with the absorbent properties of the wood grain in hardwoods. However todays recommendation is bamboo. It's less absorbent than wood, less susceptible to grooving than both wood and plastic, and less dulling on the knife than plastic.