Sultan Al Maskri studied fire engineering at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. After graduating in 2007, he joined Exova Warrington Fire, where he worked on prestigious projects such as the Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 and Trafford Centre expansions alongside his first mentor, Chris Hughes, who taught Al Maskri how to bring thoroughness into his reporting.
After joining WS Atkins, Al Maskri’s second mentor, the late Ric Piper, showed him how to negotiate with clients and justify quotations – skills that would prove invaluable when he embarked on his entrepreneurial journey.
When Al Maskri returned to Oman, fire engineering was still a relatively new concept and it was only a handful of clients who valued the service, including WS Atkins International, and COWI who, at the time, were leading the design of the Muscat International Airport expansion.
Oman Civil Defense was finding it challenging to accept unusual designs, which presented Al Maskri with the opportunity to introduce performance-based design to the Oman market. “The performance-based design I introduced aimed to show equivalency between what the fire and life safety code stipulates and a building’s design intent. We try to prove that any architectural design can be fire-safe, and we use CFD or evacuation modelling to prove this concept.”
This opportunity is what gave birth to Tenable Fire Engineering Consultancy in 2010. Since then, Al Maskri has worked closely with Civil Defense to promote the importance of fire engineering, establish robust procedures and analyse complex structures.
With offices in Dubai and Muscat, Tenable FEC is one of the largest specialist fire engineering consultancies in the region and has worked on projects including Mall of Oman, Muscat Bay, Sheikh Zayed Memorial, Etihad Museum, Zayed National Museum and the iconic Dh2-billion One@Palm Jumeirah. The team has also worked on the island resort, Ithaafushi Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives, a large shopping mall in Vietnam and the 250m-high Aqua Raffles hotel in Jeddah.
Sultan Al Maskri on… what he wishes he knew at 18
“I’ve always felt I lack certain communication skills. I‘m more of a behind-the-scenes operator than someone at the front of proceedings. I’ve never considered myself a great communicator – had I known that I would need to communicate as much as I do now, I would have trained myself earlier to be a better speaker.”
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