Episode #4

Fire Service Accreditation with Mike McQuaid

Welcome to Podcast #4. Don’t forget:

Our SUPER sponsor. Fuga Veloce – Italian for Fast Escape.
Our competition. Imagine getting driven around Sydney like a movie star in a Ferrari 360 spider. Leave a review in iTunes within the first 10 episodes and you could be a winner! To be announced in Episode 11.
Our drinking game. You can’t have a beer with an engineer without having a drinking game!! Anytime Dom says “ummm” drink up… and we can add “so” from Mel.

Born in the United States, Myke started engineering in Texas, building landing gear. He moved to Australia in 2006 where he is currently the Senior Fire Services Engineer at EWFW.
He is the creator of Dark Circus in Sydney and is into anything outdoors!
Myke enjoys doing new things.
He started out his engineering career by wanting to build hybrid-vehicles…. however, by the time he got out of university, due to legislation changes, there weren’t any jobs left in the field.

Accreditation and who can stamp plans. There is no accreditation pathway.
They’ve passed some legislation which has no real solutions in the market… e.g a client had been running a fire company for 20 years, but they aren’t allowed to sign off on drawings…
There isn’t a ‘school’ for Fire Services. You either get into it via mechanical or electrical engineering studies.
How hard it is to get good quality engineers. The amount of work doesn’t limit the engineering firms… it’s hard to grow a business without the right people.

The difference between Fire Engineers and Passive Fire Design.
The enjoyment when you receive technical, difficult engineering questions…. It can be very rewarding to find the solution that satisfies your client.
Reflect back upon the fast engineers continue to under-value themselves.
Automation is the key to the short-term future. Revit will be a large component.
Google could be poised to write a viable competitor to Revit.