Brandon Finzel is the principal and founder of FLINT Fire Engineering and a licensed fire protection engineer. He has worked in New York, Chicago and Washington, served as a fire marshal at the Pentagon, and sits on the New York City building code committee. He explains why fire and life safety is still a young profession and what project teams lose by calling it in late.

Brandon Finzel, Principal and Founder, P.E., FLINT Fire Engineering

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In this conversation

Why only three schools in the country offer a fire protection engineering degree, and how that shapes the way DC, Boston and New York approach safety.

How New York City went from a 1968 building code to 2008, and why it will adopt the 2021 international code in 2028.

The robot-run warehouse with no aisles and a quarter inch of clearance to the ceiling that Brandon had to figure out how to protect.

The theater facelift where tighter seats triggered a smoke control system nobody had planned for.

Why Brandon pitched a museum on using its fire alarm speakers for daily announcements.

Those batteries that you want to put in the basement are very hazardous, we need to do something. Their first question to me will be: what am I required to do? Not what should I do, not what can I do.

Brandon Finzel

Chapters

A young profession

Why fire protection engineering is decades old, not a century, and why that matters.

How codes catch up

New York's long code cycles and its move toward the international building code.

Technology at the speed of testing

Why safety products must be listed first, and the lithium-ion battery problem.

By the numbers

Fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in New York City

2021104

2022220

2023268

2024277

Brandon points to e-bike batteries as the newest hazard pushing codes and laws to catch up. The FDNY counted 18 deaths from these fires in 2023, up from four in 2021.

Source: FDNY figures: 2021 and 2022 as reported by FireRescue1 (2023); 2023 and 2024 from FDNY (March 2025) ↗

Tragedy writes the code

Nursing homes, 9/11, Grenfell, and the new fire risks of fast delivery.

Silos and late calls

What happens when the fire engineer arrives after the decisions are made.

Start with the definitions

Code compliance reports, reading the code from the top, and systems used every day.

Anytime we can integrate something that we use every day and fire and life safety together, I think that's the best way to approach things in the future.

Brandon Finzel

Takeaways

Bring in a fire protection engineer at concept design. A code compliance approach report of five to ten pages, updated as the project changes, costs little and avoids discovering at the eleventh hour that a building cannot be approved.

Read the code's definitions before searching it for keywords. A life safety system includes the stairs, ramps and corridors, not just alarms and sprinklers, and those definitions change what the code requires.

Pair life safety systems with something used every day, like a fire alarm that doubles as the public address system. A system people rely on daily gets fixed the day it breaks.

Engage at an early stage: a few minutes here and there can go a long way in the long run of your building.

Brandon Finzel