Major goals of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) are to improve the productivity of the U.S. construction industry, which now faces stiff competition from overseas firms, and to reduce the human and economic losses resulting from fires, earthquakes, winds, and other hazards. Through performance prediction and measurement technologies, as well as technical advances, the ...

The stone test wall was constructed to study the performance of stone subjected to weathering. It contains 2352 individual samples of stone, of which 2032 are domestic stone from 47 states, and 320 are stones from 16 foreign countries.