Harrington Group is pleased to welcome a new fire protection consultant to the team, Kyle Collins, who has been settling in our Charlotte office.
Like a lot of engineers, Kyle’s initial introduction to the industry was as a volunteer firefighter. When he was 17, he joined a department in his hometown of Julian, NC, a small community southeast of Greensboro. It started out as a way for him to get out of the house and contribute to his community. But, it also allowed him to participate in continuing education classes where he learned skills like tying knots, safely climbing to great heights, and operating the pump on the fire truck.
As a creative kid who always loved building things, Kyle says he’s known since at least middle school that he wanted to be engineer. Early on in his college career, he realized that mechanical engineering wasn’t the right avenue for him and after enrolling in the Fire and Safety Engineering Technology department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he never looked back.
He’s been in the industry for 11 years now and he continues to get confused head-tilts when someone asks what he does for a living.
“I’m a combination of mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and civil engineer,” Kyle says he tells people. “Add a little architect on top of all that and you got a fire protection engineer.”
He describes that ever-broad spectrum of fire protection as one of the most challenging elements of the industry. Most rewarding, he says, is “just knowing that people and property are going to be safe.”
Most of Kyle’s experience has been with prescriptive design of typical sprinkler systems, fire alarms, and fire pumps. He’s also done some computational fluid dynamics work for reconstruction of fire growth phases, with theoretical modeling for smoke exhaust and occupant tenability scenarios. Other work has included reviews of air sampling smoke detection and clean agent suppression calculations.
Now that he’s working for HGI, Kyle says he’s excited to be around “numerous people who are experts, not just a couple.” He’s not the fresh-faced, inexperienced recent college grad at a firm with half-a-dozen employees, nor is he a five-digit number at a company with tens of thousands of employees. He’s hit the ground running and his colleagues at the Charlotte office are thrilled to have him.
When he’s not at the office or traveling for work, Kyle loves adventuring around Charlotte with his wife and puppy (who recently celebrated his first birthday). He plays kickball every week and may be found on the weekends hiking, sampling a flight at a local brewery, or perusing the aisles at the local hardware stores for his next home-improvement project.