Need to know: Heritage buildings
H
ISTORICAL AND heritage buildings across the UK are characterised by a variety of criteria, which often include
the following: •
remote locations
• combustible materials of construction • high content loadings, which are more readily ignitable and combustible than modern equivalents
• unoccupied outside normal hours of business, or seasonal
• accessible to the public during the day
• in environmentally sensitive areas •
large and complex layouts
• lack of fire compartmentation and presence of voids throughout the building (routes for hidden fire spread)
• poor defence against a committed intruder
• high value (heritage and financial) building and contents
• periods of enhanced risk during events (with any associated decorations, such as Christmas trees)
•
difficult to protect by conventional means
54 APRIL 2020
www.frmjournal.com Fire service response
A report from the Business and Property Protection Portal (BPPP) for the area in which the heritage building is located can help the user to understand what it will take – by way of notification – to invoke a response from local fire and rescue services (FRSs) in relation to their automatic fire alarm policy. This can also help the user to understand whether the response is likely to be meaningful in terms of saving the property and its contents, as well as in terms of time, weight and reliability of FRS response. For the reasons already given, fire spread may initially go unnoticed in heritage buildings, after which development may well be very rapid. The management plan must identify likely
effectiveness and, where the FRS response is deemed to be insufficient, seek other means of achieving an acceptable loss outcome.
Impairments to firefighting
FRSs can only be effective where sufficient resources are provided and their use is permitted. The data provided by a report from
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