FOCUS
Different buildings
their aim of life safety. The heights firefighters are capable of reaching from outside the building are at most ten storeys and are more likely to be lower than this if vehicle access close to the building is restricted. The Building Regulations and alternative
engineered solutions reflect this risk with measures such as live sprinkler systems, dry or wet risers, automatic fire detection, smoke extraction and compartmentation. The combination designed into any building is aimed to provide protection for the occupants until they escape from the building or are rescued by the FRSs. Where everybody is evacuated or there is nobody in a building that is on fire, such as a warehouse or offices, the FRSs are most likely to adopt a defensive firefighting approach of extinguishing the fire from an external safe location and to protect surrounding properties. As a result, the extent of the damage to the property is likely to be significantly greater and the interruption to the business trading from the premises to be longer.
Basements and atria
In the last few years, more projects have involved the use of a podium slab over a basement level or several levels. In the completed building, the basements are often used for plant and car parking. On top of the podium slab, there could be several multi storey apartment blocks, offices or hotels where all the building cores extend to the basement car park to allow easy access. Once again, the Building Regulations and engineered solutions are there for the necessary life safety standards. However, there are some recent examples in Europe of fires in car parks that have
14 JULY/AUGUST 2018
www.frmjournal.com
resulted in the loss of numerous vehicles and increased building damage, which underline the fire load from plastic and fuel within the modern car and the difficulties of extinguishing a fire in that environment. Design and risk management in car parks needs to be looking ahead to the risks of charging and storing electric and hybrid vehicles, which bring another change to the environment. Once again, there is the obvious disconnect between the need for life safety and the standards that are required to maintain property and business resilience. Is there a danger that the Buildings Regulations won’t keep up with technological advances? Atria are used as a design feature, especially
in prestige buildings and also large shopping centres. In the shopping centres these are generally malls and not extending through more than three floors, but in the retail units they could extend through many more floors and in apartments or offices through numerous floors. Generally, they contain very little to support a
fire in the event of one starting and the Building Regulations cover the topic. The key to control in these areas is maintaining them as sterile areas, as any increase in fuel will, in the event of fire, introduce more smoke into an open plan area, where the original design expectation was that there would be minimal amounts.
Human influence
So far we have looked at the aspects of the building structure and measures in place for its safe use to protect lives, but there is a further
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