Jensen Hughes is a full-service fire protection engineering firm. We’ve been merged over the years with different companies, but it started with fire and building services; mostly for the traditional architecture and engineering market, looking at commercial properties, life safety, fire protection systems and fire detection. We’ve morphed into a full portfolio for risk management.
The company has been doing fire protection since 1939- we’re the largest fire protection firm in the world. We have over 1700 professionals working in the company, over 90 offices worldwide. Jensen Hughes work in a variety of areas, such as accessibility, type consulting, life safety all the way to fire hazard analysis, process safety for forensic investigations, security risk and emergency management.
They’re all high hazards. I think that would probably be the best way to pull them all together.
Nuclear for most people is an obvious hazard with radiation and the effects that can happen off of a bad reaction. But I think they’re all hazardous materials that can either harm health or have a physical attribute, like a fire or an explosion, a bad reaction; or things that can harm the environment, harm people or harm property.
Don Meyer
Refining is another one that’s historically very well understood. Fires happen in refineries a lot, so flammable and combustible liquids is the primary hazard there.
All three of those industries are no different when it comes to that. Pharmaceutical has very similar chemical processes, just on a different scale. However, the impacts can be quite detrimental. It’s a highly regulated industry, but it’s also a high-risk industry that they’re very aware of.
Risk Assessment for high hazard always starts with three questions; what do you do, what are you producing and what process should be put in place?
It’s asking what is your philosophy and what is your safety basis that you’re building, refining what you know into your fire protection philosophy.
How do you manage all of these different hazards within your facility – from the raw materials coming in through the reaction processes involving temperature and pressure, to the final products going out? We monitor flammable and combustible liquids at every stage.
Practically, it is also trying to figure out how there is going to be a lot of different ways to approach the risk assessment. It’s about identifying an approach that fits your operations and meets the necessary safety standards — protecting the public, your personnel, and ours. It also includes preventing harm to assets and business continuity.
By looking at all these situations together you can build your fire protection philosophy which has been our approach from the beginning.
Compliance with codes and standards is always an interesting endeavour because there’s a lot of codes and standards. For the United States, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is probably the body that makes most of the codes and standards. Most of the world seems to follow a version of the NFPA, or very close to it.
When it comes to compliance, it really starts with, when your facility was built.
There’s a code of record for most of these facilities, so you first need to identify what the code of record is. The life safety code, which started after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City has changed and progressed over the years, while some aspects have stayed very similar.
It’s always fun with existing facilities because it’s you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like buying a house. If you buy a house that was built in 1900 you’re going to find some very interesting things when you open up the walls. If you build a house today, you would expect it all to be very simple.
Sometimes, we find the small changes within the code don’t really affect the outcome of our safety and so we don’t have to do much, but other times, we do.
Don Meyer
Fire and life safety systems are constantly looking at new technology. Within every market, even fire protection, there’s new technologies coming out all the time, constantly evolving to try to address new issues or new standards.
I recently spoke at about firefighting foam at the Global Congress for Process Safety in Dallas. A great example of how things change revolve over timeis how the industry moved from a protein-based foam originally that was based on animal fats and breakdowns that that were used to fight fires. It smelled awful and it was not good for people, but it put out the fire.
We changed to fluorine free foams that worked very well. They create a film over the liquid and with the aspiration of the bubbles it creats a blanket and helps us put out fires. They are particularly good for flammable liquid fires.
Fast forward to 2025 and over the last 10 years, it has become apparent that there’s forever chemicals within the foam that are causing environmental issues. Even if there are not immediate effects, it is a build up over time and so we don’t want to do that anymore. The industry is responding.
The industry is changing even before the regulation is present because they understand and see the damage that it can do. Manufacturers are stopping producing the old foam and have already looked for new products out there.
The industry has come together and built conglomerates that are conducting tests on new products. There is new synthetic fluorine-free. Like anything else, maybe we’ll find out 20 years from now, it may not be the best thing either, but in response to that it’s probably inadvisable to continue to having flammable liquid fires either.
We still have to find a way to protect against the main hazard, which is the fire, but we want to do it in an environmentally friendly form. We want to make sure that we’re not causing longterm effects or byproducts of fighting these fires.
Lithium-ion batteries are a great example of how technology changes. Technology has changed in the market to where that has become a primary energy source and just use always been historically involved with in helping safeguard the energy market.
We have an entire sector division called energy utilities that focuses on power generation. Batteries is a little different, because the power generation is all within one pack. The premise is still there, the process is still there and the hazard is still there. It was different and where we were seeing it within the market was different.
Around 15 years ago Jensen Hughes recognized that this was going to be a problem. We were starting to see fires in lithium-ion, caused by things as small as cell phones on airplanes to electric vehicles and car batteries.
Don Meyer
Now, we’re getting into battery energy storage systems which are massive battery farms that are storing all the energy. They are a tool in trying to help the power industry respond to energy needs as the hazards are continuing to grow.
We’re seeing battery manufacturing and storage facilities burning and these different energy storage systems catching fire. The hazards are inherently a little different to a traditional fire, where batteries are based on a thermal decomposition or thermal runaway.
When you look at like a thermal runaway, all of that’s prepackaged within the chemical reaction, instead of the traditional fire triangle, where it’s all based on fuel and oxygen. It’s a very different mechanism.
