Ahmed Kashef burns things down for a living.

As the director of the fire safety testing facility at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, Dr. Kashef leads a team of scientists, engineers and technicians who operate an array of furnaces, construct buildings and then light them on fire to test the resilience of their materials.

When I visited the lab recently, Dr. Kashef told me that the growing threat of wildfires transformed his work.

“Usually the fire that we dealt with all the time was from the inside to the outside,” he said at the start of our tour. “Now the wind is a factor. The size of the fire is much bigger because it’s coming from the forest. And then it comes through the firebrand, which is the projection of hot and burned material attacking the building.”

He added: “You’re attacking the outside, not from the inside. So all that has changed the way that you need to treat buildings.”

Walking into the lab on the research council’s university-style campus feels like a return to the Diefenbaker era. A brass plaque acknowledges its 1958 opening; a shinier one in French was added sometime after bilingualism became official. Just beyond the entrance, a small museum displays obsolete instruments and photographs of researchers burning down houses on government land.

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By Ian Austen