FOCUS
Firefighter safety They tend to be concentrated on the edge of
towns, near to trunk roads and motorway junctions. The belief was that a disproportionate number of warehouses may be located in areas where fire cover is thin on the ground and often provided by retained duty system firefighters, so real attendance data was required in order to get an accurate picture. That real attendance data was provided by the
FPA, which keeps a large loss database of fires that resulted in more than £100,000 of insured losses. By picking out warehouse fires from that database, it was possible to use attendance time modelling tools to assess actual attendance times, and to create a distribution curve.
Fire conditions In order to calculate the time from ignition to the withdrawal of firefighters, the project team first had to have a description of the conditions that would result in firefighters being withdrawn from search and rescue operations. To make sure that any description of those conditions could be justified and defended, it was decided to gather evidence from serving fire officers who had attended and taken charge of warehouse fires. Once these conditions have been identified, fire modelling with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used to calculate the approximate time that the criteria would be met in a range of different circumstances. Thanks to help from the National Fire Chiefs Council and Derbyshire’s chief fire officer Terry McDermott in particular, fire officers from around the country have contributed accounts of their own experiences to the project, but unfortunately it is progress in this area that has been put on temporary hold because of the work thrown up by the fire at Grenfell Tower.
Firefighter search capacity Thanks to Red Watch based at Bury Community Fire Station, it has been possible to create a mathematical model for firefighter search capacity. The firefighters at Bury donned breathing apparatus and put a great deal of effort into dragging hose in and out of a warehouse type building several times at Greater Manchester’s training and safety centre. By measuring the distance progressed by
the firefighters at regular time intervals, it has proved possible to create an equation that predicts the distance and area searched in any given time. As soon as the fire conditions analysis has been completed, these equations will be applied to the available search time to predict the ‘safe searchable area’.
Early results From a quick review of experiences at well documented warehouse fires, it has been
34 FEBRUARY 2018
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possible to make a preliminary estimate of the time available to firefighters and therefore to apply the search area equations. A great deal of further work is required to refine and confirm these early results, but a figure of 4,000 to 5,000m2
has been generated. Final stages
Mathematical analysis will be the main issue in completing the project. All of the contributing pieces of research throw up results across a range. Attendance time of resources ranges from seven minutes to 46 minutes. The time to unsafe conditions will vary considerably according to the height of the warehouse and the materials stored. In other words, for any given size of
warehouse, if it is located near to fire stations and has goods stored on the floor, it may be ‘safe’ without sprinklers; but if it is located in a remote rural location with goods stored on racks, it may not be ‘safe’ without sprinklers. We therefore foresee that the project will combine these distributions to present its results as ‘options for change’: •
calling for sprinklers even in the smallest of buildings might mean that firefighters would only be ‘unsafe’ on 5% of occasions
• •
calling for sprinklers only in medium and large buildings might mean that firefighters would be ‘unsafe’ on 30% of occasions
calling for sprinklers only in the largest buildings might mean that firefighters would be ‘unsafe’ on 50% of occasions
It will then be up to the Building Regulations Advisory Committee, and ultimately the Secretary of State, to decide how safe firefighters should be
Dave Sibert is national fire safety and IRMP advisor for the Fire Brigades Union. For more information, view page 5
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