requirement – is it time for that to change? In today’s civilised society, as we go about our daily business, our wellbeing is afforded many protections against perils of varying types and likelihood. In the case of fire, many of these protections


are quite visible and well understood by everyone – they are part of our upbringing: the fire extinguisher in the corridor; the sprinkler head and smoke detector in the ceiling; the hose reel on the wall; and the myriad of signs that denote the presence of fuels, need to control ignition sources, routes of escape, and fire doors – to name but a few.


Other protections are less obvious, for


example the size of the space, its layout and the fire properties of the materials forming the structure. In certain special situations, these protections are extended even further to consider toxicity.


Specific selection


Whether you are sitting on a train, on the London Underground, flying in a plane or travelling by boat, the likelihood is that the materials surrounding you have been specifically selected to ensure that when there is a fire, the toxicity of the products resulting from their involvement will have a lower chance of impeding your escape, or indeed disabling you altogether.


On this point let’s be clear – we are not


talking about whether the materials can natively sustain burning or not; rather it is an evaluation of whether, under the influence of fire, the presence of these materials will act to make the overall threat greater by producing toxic byproducts. This is very different to the selection of


materials on the basis of whether they are natively ‘combustible’ or not. But clearly these are very special circumstances; in


20 MARCH 2020 www.frmjournal.com Years of neglect


Why has the potential toxicity of building materials under fire been neglected as a consideration for so many years? One issue is that the perceived threat from the unregulated contents of a room probably presents a much higher and more immediate threat to any toxins that might ingress the occupied space first. This assumption is obviously dependent


upon a number of other key assumptions. Firstly, that the world is a perfect place and that what is drawn on paper is what gets delivered at the end of the day with computer assisted design (CAD) level accuracy – I think you need to look no further than the recent large hotel, care home, and apartment fires to make a judgement on that. Even if build quality could be tightened up


to the point of installation perfection, there is still the human element – the fire door most likely propped open with a fire extinguisher emptied of its contents in the last student water fight, or the broken door closer never replaced. Cynical possibly, but even when everything is done right, we have to question whether our building regulations appropriately separate people from fire toxins.


RISCAuthority insight T


Dr Jim Glockling asks if it’s time to consider fire toxicity when choosing building materials for certain high risk situations and occupancies


HE BUILT environment lags behind other areas, such as transport, in its consideration of fire toxicity as part of the material selection


transport situations you are often remote from help, with your safety assured only by the ability of the inbuilt passive systems to keep you properly separated from the fire, and the performance of active systems such as sprinklers to protect you from the threat at your location or any area you must pass through. This is clearly not a situation you ever find in the built environment... or is it? Is the plight of a person at the top of a high rise building, or someone of limited mobility in a lower environment, not basically exactly the same as someone far out to sea in a boat? They are all dependent on inbuilt protection, rather than on their ability to allow you to leave the scene, or on others’ ability to arrive and provide help.


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