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Station and caused £5.6m of damage, as well as significant disruption to the rail network and local community. That fire occurred after Network Rail had spent £60m refurbishing the station, but without including sprinklers. At the trial of the arsonist, Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service (NFRS) said that the rapid spread of this ‘incredibly demanding’ fire was the result of a design flaw and the station’s ‘complex construction’.
It comes as a surprise then that sprinklers
were viewed by Network Rail as a ‘red herring’ and ‘not part of building regulations’. If sprinklers had been fitted, this major fire would have been an hour long incident and the toilets where the fire started would have been out of action for a week at most. Instead, the fire caused significant damage to the Grade II listed building and several days of disruption across the city. Sprinklers were not part of the redesign
following the fire and remain a continuing concern for NFRS, which commented: ‘Sprinklers limit the fire spread. They undoubtedly save lives and limit fire damage.’ This fire highlights once again that most people consider that our building regulations should be in place to limit the damage to such property. However, that is not their remit, hence the comments from Network Rail. Railway stations are one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in any city, so why are we not stopping fire in its tracks?
46 JULY/AUGUST 2020
www.frmjournal.com
Better protection
Fires such as those discussed earlier once again highlight the rationale for greater consideration of property protection alongside life safety as a reasonable requirement. Such an expectation would result in more buildings being designed to be resilient to disproportionate damage, using combinations of passive and active fire safety measures. The Business Sprinkler Alliance (BSA) believes that sprinkler systems would be a major part of this change and that sprinklers should be considered more readily as a viable option right across the built environment – whether in a block of flats, hospital, school, care home, retail or leisure facility, or commercial and industrial building.
One of the most efficient and effective
ways to reduce the impact of fire is through measures which ensure that when fires start, they are quickly extinguished so that damage is minimised. Fire sprinkler systems do just that – they make buildings and businesses resilient to the impact of fire because they automatically control or even put out the fire before the fire and rescue service arrives, with the result that the use of the building and/or the business can be resumed, usually within hours of the incident. It should always be appreciated that UK fire
safety laws set the minimum guidance around fire protection for the safety of persons in and around buildings. By simply complying with fire
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