Fire Protection Handbook, Fifteenth Edition.

This Fifteenth Edition of the Fire Protection Handbook is presented in the continuing tradition of fulfilling the needs of the fire protection community for a single source reference book on good fire protection and fire prevention practices. Its contents are offered as a summation and reflection of state-of-the-art fire technology. As in any dynamic and progressive field, research into fundamentals and the actual practice of applied technology is of a continuing nature---never is it finished and always is it building on what has gone on before. Since 1896 and through fourteen editions the Fire Protection Handbook has attempted to chronicle in a useful and orderly fashion the growth in that body of knowledge so essential to a comprehensive familiarity and enlightened awareness of the depth of the fire problems and the manifest ways those problems can be solved. As one who has been intimately associated for more than 20 years with compiling and producing four editions of the Handbook, the editor has come to realize how far-reching and profound have been the changes in attitudes that have come to fire protection in the span of two decades. He recalls, for example, the singular emphasis in earlier editions with the "nuts and bolts" technology of fire protection and fire suppression to the almost total exclusion of concern with "human engineering" or explanation of how physical and psychological reactions to fire must be examined, measured, and factored into the equations of sound fire protection practices.(from foreword)