Summary

Shortly after the turn of the last century, the cellulosic fire time/temperature curve was developed to assess the performance and safety of building materials and passive fire resistive materials. It was the cutting edge for its time. But, according to Chris Burst, the composition and contents of our built environment today prove its time has run out.

Also in the episode, Toby isn’t sure he’s never seen a ghost, and Chris tells a bad joke.

This episode contains references to a three-part article series we recently published about modern fire loads. Read them here: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Timestamps

Click to follow along with the transcript:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:07 – What we mean by "modern"
• 05:04 – Old, old standards
• 06:03 – Proliferation of rechargeable batteries
• 07:18 – Visualizing time/temperature curves
• 12:24 – These fires are harder to extinguish
• 15:24 – Structured parking complicates matters
• 20:26 – Don't blame EVs
• 22:27 – Similarities to tunnel fires
• 24:35 – Leveraging existing alternatives
• 26:12 – Ramifications of adopting code changes
• 30:53 – Modern spaces require modern material safety testing
• 32:53 – The four questions: Spooky Halloween edition

Transcript

Introduction

Toby Wall: I hope you have your time machines ready because we're going back in time. A time when two brothers from Ohio introduced the world to powered flight. When the first mass affordable automobile rolls off the assembly line of a long brick building in Detroit. And great powers playing diplomatic chicken in Europe will lead to a horrendous world war. But something else happened in the early 1900s and its legacy remains too. We came up with cellulosic fire curves. On this episode of The Red Bucket, we ask: Are those fire curves still useful? The Red Bucket is happy to have Chris Burst joining us today. Chris, what is your role?

Chris Burst: Hi Toby, I am the Product Line Manager for our fireproofing products here at Carboline.

What we mean by "modern"

Toby: That makes you the person to talk to when we talk about modern fire loads. Now we use the word modern on purpose, but let's dissect that a little bit because we're implying something in the word modern.

Chris: Modern in comparison to what?

Old, old standards

Toby: Well, you tell us . Why are we talking about modern fire loads and not just fire loads?

Chris: Simply because things have changed. When we talk about fire loads, and, specifically the cellulosic world or the commercial fire world, they've been around for a long time and they haven't really changed. We've seen, essentially to this day, the testing we do and the fire loads that we mimic are the same as they were at the turn of the 20th century.

Toby: Let's define some terms here. I think folks in the, in the fireproofing world will know everything that you've just said. But folks who are even, you know, touched by this, but not well versed in it, won't have any idea where we're going with this. So, let's start with cellulosic and commercial. And I don't know if, if every listener will understand how those two relate.

Chris: Sure, sure. So, when we talk about fires in general, not everything burns the same. So the world of fireproofing is generally split into two different pieces. You have hydrocarbon fires, which as the name implies are hydrocarbons burning. It might be liquefied natural gas or oil or some kind of petrochemical. We won't really be talking about that today. The other side of it is what we call a cellulosic fire. So cellulose is a component of wood, paper, many different things, that burns very differently than say a pool of hydrocarbon. And cellulosic fire is essentially what we see in commercial spaces or residential spaces or institutional spaces. So you may have a hospital or a school or an apartment building or an office building. Those are generally classified as commercial fireproofing areas or cellulosic fire areas. And those fires were originally modeled in around the turn of the century, and we still use those models to this day.

Toby: The problem being that the materials in those spaces that we call commercial might not always be cellulosic in nature.

Chris: Correct. Correct. Back in 1916, the furniture was completely wood. Any upholstery was cotton or wool. There were no composite materials of any kind. Everything was heavy and dense and while it may have burned hot, it didn't burn quick. This day and age, the carpet you might be standing on might be made of polyester and the furniture you're sitting on may have a plastic padding and the desk you're sitting at may be made of oriented strand board or, or essentially heavy duty cardboard. All of these things burn incredibly differently than they did in the past. They burn hotter, they burn faster, and they put off some pretty nasty gases and smoke.

Proliferation of rechargeable batteries

Toby: Not to mention more and more electronic devices that are inside of these spaces. You know, there are more televisions in an office or an apartment or that kind of thing, and certainly bigger televisions than you had in the past.

Chris: Absolutely.

Toby: Laptops, cell phones, you name it.

Chris: Things made of plastic, and plastic is made of hydrocarbons. It will burn differently than, I don't know, your great grandfather's wooden computer, or whatever they may have had back in the day. His abacus. . But the standards are the same as they were back then. Our failure criteria when we do these tests, and these tests are essentially, when we do a test on a fireproofing material, we put it in a furnace, and the furnace is designed to mimic a temperature at a certain set period of time. What we call a fire curve, a time temperature curve. And we use the same from, well, ASTM C19 was the original, or at least in North America here, and ASTM E119 now is the standard that we use. It really hasn't changed since, you know, the early days of flight. When you'd still see horses out on, you know, in a street potentially. And it really doesn't apply today. You can't, it is what's used, it's what's called foreign code, but it's not, it's not really sufficient. Many people are starting to believe.

Toby: There's another aspect of what are we putting into these spaces that changes the way a fire might behave should there be a fire in one of them. I don't want to dwell too much on it because this isn't necessarily a, you know, this isn't about EVs, electric vehicles. This isn't about home scale or even larger than that, you know, community scale batteries or battery packs or battery complexes. But you do have these.

Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, you have, as everyone is, I assume, has seen on the news at some point, electric vehicles. I have a lot of, oftentimes lithium ion battery packs. Those can burn very, very hot. They burn very, very quickly. They're also very difficult to extinguish. And that put together can kind of overwhelm the fireproofing designed for essentially your grandparents house. You know, type of fire you might see in that environment can't hold up to an EV or in some cases even say a rechargeable lithium ion battery from a power tool. You know, things, there are many things in a normal home or office that will burn hotter and faster than anything, anything in a home at the turn of the century, turn of the 20th century.

Visualizing time/temperature curves

Toby: So now that we've kind of painted the picture of the kinds of fires that can burn, you've used the words they burn hotter, they burn faster when you're talking about hydrocarbon versus cellulosic. You did mention fire curves. I wonder if you can compare what does a cellulosic curve look like versus what does a hydrocarbon curve look like to help, you know, and these are things anyone who's listening to this can go online and find it, can read it, but, this narration that you give us might help as they do that.

Chris: Sure, so a cellulosic fire as, as mimicked as we, as we test to today, it's designed to mimic a, fire where it's generally wood burning. The fuel does not run out, but you see a pretty quick temperature rise at the beginning of these tests. And then, over a period of about four hours, you end up getting up to roughly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. But it takes four hours to get there. As you can imagine, a pool of hydrocarbons burning, it's going to spread. Any fire is going to spread very, very quickly, the fumes above that pool, That fire test reaches 2000 degrees in roughly five minutes or maybe even a little less. So it is an immediate, very hot fire rather than a slow burn over time. And especially with the cellulosic curve, if you're, if you're talking about an hour or two hours into the fire, you are not really anywhere near the temperatures you see in a hydrocarbon fire and for example, battery pack burning within a matter of seconds can reach those hydrocarbon-type temperatures. Overwhelmed the system that you have.

Toby: I was going to, say that while I don't think there is an, a formal fire curve for lithium ion battery packs or for those kinds of events, Those events when you have the luxury of being able to record what is happening when something is burning, you have measured that, I read something, it's like within 90 seconds, you have the same heat that you have that takes 5 minutes for a hydrocarbon fire to generate.

Chris: Yeah, as with the, I mean, the fire curves have, you know, for 100 years, more than that now, it's our best guess, to mimic what is actually happening in the real world. We don't have that widely accepted, and code-required, curve for battery packs. We do have a widely accepted one or a variety of them for the hydrocarbon world. In North America it's commonly UL 1709, which is sometimes used almost as a shorthand for hydrocarbon pool fires. So we have a widely accepted standard with many materials approved and tested and approved to resist that environment. So it may be at the time the most reasonable analog we have to those very severe fires we see. Whether if an EV is involved, or in some cases it doesn't have to be an EV. If you can imagine, say a parking garage attached to an apartment building or an office building, code requires that the product, the fire protection of the products used meet ASTM E119. So this, that's the cellulosic fire curve. Well, not only wasn't it designed for cars, the closest thing they might've had at the time was a Model T. Now we might have a large pickup truck holding 20 gallons of gasoline and made of a bunch of plastic. Not even including an electric vehicle. You could have a fire of that sort as well. So it, there's multiple levels of, we don't quite have it right at the moment.

These fires are harder to extinguish

Toby: Anyone listening to this, who's may have been following some of the information that Carboline has put out over the last handful of months might remember a series of articles on, we called it "modern fire loads", and this is sort of the, the point that I wanted to get to anyway, it took us a while, we had to circle around to get there, I think it was necessary to describe the risk matrix, but, in that series of articles, we described a handful of fire events that seem to account for all of these different changes in the risk profile. We've talked about synthetics in the built environment as opposed to natural materials. We've talked about automobiles being present in a structure that's either a part of or very nearby occupied space. We've talked about how EVs, or it doesn't have to be a car, but any battery, complicating matters because should something like that catch fire, it's, the very nature of its design makes it hard to put out. We should make sure we stress that point, that the reason, part of the reason why a battery fire so hard to put out is because much care in the engineering of those components is put into making sure nothing gets inside those sensitive areas.

Chris: Keeping water out. Yeah.

Toby: Because you don't want that to happen.

Chris: Correct.

Toby: Lithium, you may know from chemistry class if you had a brick of lithium in your hand and threw it into a pond, what would happen? It would explode. So you want to keep water out and that's why when it catches fire, dousing it with a hose is going to take a while for that to be effective.

Chris: You're likely not going to have an Olympic sized swimming pool to either push the vehicle in or whatever battery it might be.

Toby: In some of the reading that I've done on this topic, which was sort of shocking to me but then not surprising the more I, the more I read was, it's becoming a part of various fire departments' standard procedure when they know that a battery is on fire, and I think they're referring to if it's an electric vehicle or if it's a home-sized battery bank, that unless there's some really important reason why they should try to put that fire out, they are not going to fight the fire. They are going to leave it.

Chris: Because a battery fire not only produces, you know, immense amounts of heat, it can also put off things like hydrogen gas and hydrofluoric acid, where those are going to be at least as dangerous to people in the area. So yeah, it's sometimes it's better if you can't put it out, just get people out and wait it out. And this isn't some new novel thing that we're coming up with. Across the industry, across the world of fireproofing. It's more and more recognized that, one, the existing standards we have don't really cut it. And, two, there's nothing we can really do until code changes. So, code doesn't really change until something really bad happens.

Structured parking complicates matters

Toby: I think what's alarming about that is, first of all, that it's true. Second of all, the more, the more you search, it's not like we're waiting for the bad things to have happened. They did. They are happening. There's an interesting concept that came up in some of the research I was doing for this, and, we wrote a little bit about it in that article series again. Those disasters that we talked about were chosen specifically because they contained all of these risks. The one that we didn't talk about yet is parking garages. Every incident that we covered, and those four are not the only four. There's dozens more. Involved parking garages. In some cases, I would say, definitely one case, potentially in a second case, there was an occupied commercial or residential space either on top of the structured parking or within a few meters of the structured parking.

Chris: Connected to, next to, yeah.

Toby: I mean it's not that different, is it Chris, from having a house next to an oil processing plant really?

Chris: Not, not all that different. I mean you have a two ton block of batteries and plastic or plastic and gasoline or maybe a group of hundreds of these blocks all in a small area. You know it's fire can spread. It isn't all that different from truly your home. You have one of these parked in a garage attached to your home. Some insurance companies are, are saying don't do that, you can void your home insurance. So, there's awareness that, that these fires, and the ways that we've tried to mitigate them in the past don't really apply anymore, you know, the idea of building a, say, a firewall between a house and a garage, the way they've been done is no longer sufficient. That's the residential world, how does that work, say, in an apartment building attached to a parking garage., An office building above a parking garage, say a buried parking garage full of incredibly flammable items.

Toby: And more of these are being built.

Chris: Every day.

Toby: We in the U.S. might not see this out in the world as much as you might see it in Europe, parts of Asia. And in those regions, you are going to be confronting this all the time.

We're about to see it happen in the U.S. too. When, especially in urban areas, as land values increase, the cost to build a building, and keep in mind that unless zoning rules change, that's going to have to have X amount of parking spaces. Where are you going to put those?

Chris: Yeah.

Toby: Now, if you're way out in the middle of nowhere, you can do it and it's cheap and it works.

Chris: Yeah.

Toby: You can't do that in the middle of some large city.

Chris: You can't. And yeah, as the demand for housing continues to increase, there are oftentimes code-required minimums, say one parking spot per apartment. And that means you have a large two ton vehicle parked right next door. There's not a good way at the moment. You know, sprinklers, won't necessarily put them out. Firefighters aren't going to want to get in there and, you know, it's too dangerous to, to go into these areas and fight a fire.

Toby: Again, if you're looking back through those articles that we wrote in the second of those, we talked about the Stavanger fire in Norway, firefighters in route to the parking structure that was engulfed couldn't find the fire hydrants. They also had difficulty navigating their fire trucks. I mean, if you've driven through any parking garage anywhere in the world, even if you're in your regular sized sedan, it feels a little cramped. You wonder if you're about to hit that, hit that beam above you that with the clearance of seven and a half feet or something, try getting a fire truck to the source of a fire in a space like that.

Chris: Yeah. And that's not going to change, you know, that you're not going to say, well, we need to, we need to make these parking garages more open and airy and less full. Land use is at a premium. That's just not going to happen. So, you have to essentially ride it out. You can't necessarily get in and fight fires in these places like, like you could. And these fires are spreading faster than they, they ever have. You know, that, that heat and the speed at which these things burn mean it can, it can start in one vehicle and move on to the next and the next and the next and essentially a chain reaction very, very quickly.

Don't blame EVs

Toby: I think it's, it would be good for us to mention just in case anybody is, is under some kind of mistaken impression, let's debunk some of the misinformation. In none of these cases were electric vehicles the cause of those fires.

Chris: Correct.

Toby: It was not true. It ran rampant on social media that it was an EV, especially in Luton, the Luton Airport fire, that it was an EV that started that fire. No, it wasn't. Were there EVs inside that parking garage? Yes.

Chris: Did they contribute to the fire? Yes. Did it start the fire?

Toby: No.

Chris: You know, this risk is still there on a garage full of internal combustion vehicles where you have 15 or 20 gallons of gasoline and a whole bunch of plastic in a vehicle that's twice the size of an equivalent one from 20 or 30 years ago.

Toby: Conventional gasoline or petrol vehicles are perfectly capable of causing some kind of catastrophic collapse of a structure. EVs are in these structures. You don't need them to be in there for the, the worst thing to happen.

Chris: As we saw not too long ago in Philadelphia, I-95, there was a bridge, or an overpass collapsed with a gasoline tanker, catching fire where, that gasoline is the same essentially as, as we see in these refinery fires with these hydrocarbon fire curves that we're trying to mimic. It's no different. So that's really why we think that's the way to go at least for the interim. That's, that's the best way to future-proof is take the severe thing we know about now and apply it to the, I guess gap we have today between the protection that these things are tested for and the real world exposure.

Similarities to tunnel fires

Toby: One more topic that I want to, I just really want to talk about it, I guess. I don't know what we conclude from it or what the wisdom of Chris is on this, but I want to bring it up just because it's fascinating to me. An initial report by the fire service in Liverpool, England. One of those disasters that we had profiled occurred there at a place called King's Dock. And one aspect of the fire investigation there was about the movement of air, about the ventilation, about the openness of that parking area. Was it open enough? Were there, you know, marketing or advertising banners that had been hung from the side of it that obstructed the, the normal flow of air, which could have contributed to the severity of that event? And the answer to that was no. Those, any banners that were along the side of that building didn't meaningfully make a difference to the ventilation. But, where I'm headed with this is you mentioned subsurface parking garages. Obviously, you can't have those be as open as above-grade structured parking. It acts a little bit like a tunnel, doesn't it?

Chris: Absolutely.

Toby: We have a standard or a set of standards for those, too, don't we?

Leveraging existing alternatives

Chris: Yes, there are standards and fire curves designed to mimic the fire we would see in, say, an automobile tunnel. Say, a two-mile long tunnel underneath a mountain. If you can imagine that, well, it's full of these, you know, thousands of pounds of plastic and gasoline, in some cases, batteries. A tunnel is going to be full of automobiles, just like a parking garage. It's going to be difficult to access and difficult to firefight just like a parking garage and those standards exist. So that's another possible route where we have a fire, a hydrocarbon fire curve, or maybe a tunnel curve. That, that we use that as the baseline going forward for any area that has these, you know, potential fire loads. Or maybe we start to see a separation between different parts of the building. Getting fire tests or fire materials from different standards. Maybe you start to see a specialization of products for different parts of a building. It is incredibly expensive and incredibly difficult to update or improve the fireproofing in an existing building. To go in and add more, or to change a material. That's best done during the construction phase. You know, when a building's being built. If a building's in use, you can't easily go back in and add more. Or change the material selection. So, it's a bit of a, you know, as the, if the code does change, then the way things are done will change as well. That doesn't mean all these old structures will immediately become resistant to, say, a fire closer to what you'd see in a refinery than an apartment building. Code, I believe, will change. There is an awareness that these issues exist. There is a push within the industry to essentially modernize what we do. And it's, you know, it will happen one of these days where we update what the code requires in terms of the types of fire tests or types of materials that are going to be used.

Ramifications of adopting code changes

Toby: Chris, should that occur, it's not just confined here in our industry where change is going to happen. This is going to ripple outward. So what can it mean?

Chris: Sure. So you, you could absolutely say, see a building constructed, say today, in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, maybe if the code has changed, it no longer truly has anywhere near the fire protection or the fire protection duration or the rating that it initially was intended to have. That could have effects on insurance rates, where, you know, all of a sudden the code changes or code changes adopted, and a building that was once considered to have two hours of fireproofing, now, according to the new code, maybe has none of it, or 30 minutes, or whatever it may be. You may see old materials taken off the market because they no longer meet the new requirements. You may see huge increases in the cost of renovation of old buildings. You know, you can't, once you maybe open up a wall or you remove some fireproofing, you can't put back the old stuff because it's not meeting the new requirements. There's, it's kind of a Pandora's box of what can happen. When you talk about life safety materials, like fireproofing. You want to be careful, but it's going to be expensive. All this can be boiled down to, it's going to be expensive when this happens. And, we talk about here at Carboline, we talk in the industry about ways to, to mitigate, you know, these costs or to, in a way, future-proof the structures that are being built today. The problem is that you have to comply to today's code when you're building a building today. So one of the ways we think you may be able to essentially future-proof a building is use something that meets today's codes and meets what may be tomorrow's codes as well. So there are materials out there that, that are both rated for cellulosic fire and for hydrocarbon fire. So assuming hydrocarbons the best we've got today to mimic what's coming down the road, maybe you use a material that that can get both, you know, you, you meet the code today, and kind of build in a little extra safety for down the road.

Toby: This is where we close the loop a little bit on, you know, if we're saying the, these old fire tests, okay, those have got to go. So what should take their place? It's not like we're starting from zero there. Now, of course, it might not be perfect. You mentioned 1709 as the hydrocarbon standard. There's other standards which have a similar shape in their curve. Yes. Yeah. We can look at some of those for inspiration, or I should say the industry could look to some of those for inspiration if they're going to change code that applies to, you know, occupied spaces, residential, commercial spaces. It might have to look like an industrial space.

Modern spaces require modern material safety testing

Chris: Yeah, yeah. To build a new standard from scratch or a new fire curve from scratch, even if you do that, it's going to take a decade to develop materials and to, you know, actually take this, these ideas and get them out into the real world. So, maybe we, we start with something we know, something, you know, that's out there. Something that has acceptance, maybe not in the architectural world, but has wide acceptance in the industrial world. Maybe we just kind of, you know, merge the two in some way or, or cheat off the, the answer, you know, that we already have from that, say, hydrocarbon world. As more and more of the materials around us are hydrocarbon-based.

Toby: Maybe at first, at first glance it would seem outlandish that we're saying, "Hey, look at a hydrocarbon curve. Look at the tunnel fire curves as inspiration for new ways to, new ways to think about the way we design and build," like why would we do that? Well, here's why, because more and more, we are building our environment to behave like these other places and when those catch fire it burns hotter and faster. We're building an environment that, parts of it can behave a lot like a tunnel and when things burn in a tunnel, you don't need to go very far in an internet search to find out just how disastrous that can be.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, and the fire standards we're using today were inspired by events like the Great Chicago Fire.

Toby: Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

Chris: Yeah, you can blame the cow for all of this. It's things like the fires in San Francisco after the earthquake. If you can imagine San Francisco in 1906 or Chicago in 1871, aren't all that similar to San Francisco in 2024 or Chicago in 2024. You know, slightly different infrastructure built these days. So, it was a noble thing to, to develop these curves and try to protect the steel in a structure. We can applaud the work done before the Wright brothers took off and try to do better going forward.

Toby: I think we should stop it there. We've, we've covered a lot of ground. I'm sure if we sat here long enough, we could find more to cover. And that's just proof of what a what a big subject this is. And I think what a big task it is for the folks who are going to be responsible for, for the solutions. Not that, I don't want to suggest Carboline is just going to sit here and not try to be helpful in solving it. I don't think we would have gone to the trouble of doing any of the work that we've done this subject and sitting down and talking about this if we weren't invested in being helpful.

Chris: Absolutely.

The four questions: Spooky Halloween edition

Toby: So, with that said, we are approaching Halloween, Chris. And, we have very important part of this program called the Four Questions. And I have four questions for you. I hope you're ready to get a little spooky.

Chris: I'll do my best.

Toby: Chris, what's the worst or stupidest Halloween costume that you remember wearing when you were growing up?

Chris: Oh, I believe I may have been a mummy at one point, which was very, very warm and uncomfortable because as we are in the Midwest, sometimes Halloween can be cold and wet and damp and sometimes it can be 77 degrees and, you know, sunny. So I believe it was, it was maybe that. Just, you know, this is what I want to be without any thought for the future. I didn't look at the weather when I was eight. I didn't know.

Toby: Yeah. You would have been better off being a mummy last year because I think we set, we set a low temperature record last year and 29 degrees or something.

Chris: Yeah. Would have been, would have been great. Yeah.

Toby: On the flip side, instead of worst or stupidest, one of my favorite parts about being an adult at Halloween time is encountering the people who have really creative topical costume ideas. And I wonder if you can remember any really good ones that, I don't know, gave you a good chuckle.

Chris: Several years ago I, I saw many Ken Bone. Which was at the time topical and appeared fairly comfortable and cozy. You know, real, real big brain ideas there. You know, just wear what you got in your closet. You got a red sweater, you got some khakis, right there. You've got a, you've got a memeable costume right there.

Toby: Some context might be helpful for, for folks who don't remember.

Chris: This was several years ago of a presidential election. There was, a debate and a memorable member of the audience, I believe an undecided voter asking some questions, a just affable man wearing a red, I don't know, a distinctive red sweater. Google Ken Bone.

Toby: Chris is referring to the presidential debate which occurred in St. Louis.

Historically, Washington University in St. Louis has always hosted one of the two or three or four, whatever, debates in that cycle. And he refers to Ken Bone, who was in the audience. Ken Bone is from a small town not too far from St. Louis, which is why he's in the audience, because it's close by. And at that time, 2016, I was working for a local newspaper in this area. I was at that debate by the way.

Chris: Wonderful. Wow.

Toby: Question number three. It is a St. Louis tradition for trick or treaters to be asked to tell a joke before they are given any candy. Do you have any good trick or treat jokes?

Chris: Oh.

Toby: Now that you're a man in your 30s, you don't need to. You're not expected to.

Chris: No. No.

Toby: While Chris thinks about the joke, I'll ask him the fourth question, and then we can come back to the third question. But maybe by asking this question, I can put the paranormal tag on this podcast and instead of our normal amount of listeners, we'll get millions. Have you been any place supposedly haunted?

Chris: I have. There is an area in St. Louis, an old, there's an old brewery in St. Louis known as the Lemp Brewery. That's now abandoned. And there's the Lemp Mansion, which is where the, I guess the owners of the brewery, the family lived for many, many years. And it's apparently one of the more haunted places in the country. Watch, I don't know, Discovery Channel or A&E or History or whatever it may be. They've done deep dives and peer reviewed research on this spot.

Toby: The science is rock solid.

Chris: The science is rock solid. Very haunted. I have never seen a ghost. Have you seen a ghost, Toby?

Toby: No.

Chris: You sure?

Toby: I guess I can't be sure.

Chris: You can't be sure. Yeah.

Toby: I can tell you that I've never knowingly seen a ghost.

Chris: Never knowingly seen a ghost. I think I'm in the same boat.

Toby: I've gone places that were supposedly haunted. And I'm in the camp where, you know, if you asked me, Chris, "Toby, do you believe in ghosts?" And I would say, "I'm tremendously skeptical that there are ghosts."

Chris: How about ghouls? Spirits?

Toby: No ghouls, no spirits.

Chris: Apparitions?

Toby: No, no wraiths.

Chris: Another little bit of St. Louis, I guess, Halloween-y trivia is the events that supposedly inspired The Exorcist occurred here in St. Louis. Very spooky.

Toby: Chris, how about that joke?

Chris: How Why'd the ghost go into the bar?

Toby: I don't know.

Chris: For the "boos."

Toby: Oh, goodness gracious.

Chris: Great thing to do growing up was, as you're trick-or-treating with your friends. As Toby said, everyone was required to tell a joke before you got your candy. It was a lot of fun to steal your friend's joke and then put them on the spot and see if they froze up. Good times, good times.

Toby: Yeah, you gotta have your backup jokes.

Chris: You gotta have at least two or three ready to go.

Toby: I'm not from St. Louis, so it was new to me to see kids doing that.

Chris: It really should be a national thing. You know, work for your candy, kid.

Toby: All right. We're going to leave it there. It's an enlightening conversation, not necessarily cheerful one when we're talking about these fire loads and the risks associated with changes in our built environment. But a conversation that I think needs to be had and one that, as you stated, the right people are starting to have it.