FSM
Feature
Ensuring Fire Doors Achieve Their Life Safety Goals
Simon Castle from BMTRADA accredited construction and refurbishment company, Chisholm & Winch, discusses the importance of compliant safety door installation in stadia.
Since the Grenfell tragedy in 2017, the construction sector has taken significant steps to ensure fire safety is embedded in the specification process for all new buildings, leading to increased due diligence in material selection and construction best practice.
For stadia, the fire safety requirements are quite specific. Large occupancy capacity, limited ingress and egress points, lack of compartmentation and the difficulties of evacuating occupants unfamiliar with the layout of the building are just a few of the challenges. And, of course, the fire safety considerations are not limited to crowds visiting the stadium on match days but include office, retail and catering areas too. For a growing number of modern stadia, there may also be other facilities, such as club museums, leisure facilities or even healthcare provision.
Meanwhile, the amount of plant required in a stadium, for lighting, pitch management, heating and cooling, also mean that there is a need to control the spread of fire from plant room areas. Smoke detection and zoned fire alarms have an important role to play in providing an early fire warning, but passive fire protection is also essential, which includes the correct specification and installation of fire doors to inhibit the spread of fire and smoke.
Matching the Fire Door to the Location
The purpose of fire doors is to reduce risk to life by slowing down the rate at which fire, smoke and heat can spread, allowing time for evacuation, and limiting damage to the building and its contents. In a stadium, where lack of ventilation in corridors and tunnels can cause heat and smoke to intensify rapidly, an expert approach is required to plan the location of fire doors, specify them correctly and install them to the highest standards. Fire doors must always be installed and maintained by an accredited fire door contractor, whether they are being retrofitted as part of a safety upgrade, installed during a refurbishment or form part of a new build project.
Fire doors are rated by the amount of burn time they provide to protect people and assets on the opposite side of the door. So, an FD30 door slows the spread of fire for 30 minutes, while an FD60 door offers 60 minutes’, etc. The level of protection required for different areas of the stadium will depend on a variety of risk factors and the doors selected for each fire door location should meet the required level of protection but avoid over-specification because higher-rated doors are both more costly and take longer to fit. For example, we would expect an FD120 door for plant room areas, an FD60 door for public areas and an F30 door for back office locations.
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