UMD Wisconsin and WPI CS

retiredfarmer
Tue, 03 Apr 2018 17:49:08 +0000

@Bda2022

My wife typed the first textbook written on the Chemistry of fire while at WPI in the '70’s for a visiting professor from one of the Edinburgh universities. This Edinburgh University had been the only school outside of the Soviet Union that had a graduate program in fire science. When the Falklands war broke out in 1982, a British destroyer’s superstructure caught fire during an Argentine aircraft’s attack. The British were very embarrassed and the Great British Navy was humiliated. The British government went looking for fire scientists to explain why this had happened.

Just five or so years earlier, the British had closed down the fire science program. The classically trained government politicians put all their funding into classical education. They did not identify the need to fund fire science research. They went looking for an explanation and found they had fired the few people they needed to address this embarrassing problem. The expert was at WPI.

The answer was found in the chemical composition of the metal alloys used in the super structure. When subjected to high a high enough temperature, the metal burned/blew up! The British redesigned there combat ships and the politicians re-established the fire science program.

WPI established their Fire Science program in the 1970’s. When the World Trade Center was attacked in 9/11, it was a WPI Fire Science professor who modeled the fire to produce the official analysis of the 9/11 fire.

At WPI Fire Science Engineering would be a five year combined BS/MS program, see: https://www.wpi.edu/academics/undergraduate/bachelors-masters-degree and https://www.wpi.edu/academics/departments/fire-protection-engineering. WPI does not offer a BS degree in FPE. University of MD offers the only accredited BS in FPE: see http://www.enfp.umd.edu/undergrad. MD also offers the BS/MS option.