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Fire Safety: A Sociological Perspective Graham Spinardi Ove Arup Foundation/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Integrating Technical and Social Aspects of Fire Safety Expertise and Engineering 4 June 2013

Fire Safety: A Sociological Perspective

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Fire Safety: A Sociological Perspective. Graham Spinardi Ove Arup Foundation/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Integrating Technical and Social Aspects of Fire Safety Expertise and Engineering 4 June 2013. How is Fire Safety Social?. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Fire Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Graham Spinardi

Ove Arup Foundation/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Integrating Technical and

Social Aspects of Fire Safety Expertise and Engineering

4 June 2013

Page 2: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

How is Fire Safety Social?

• How individuals, families, colleagues, etc cause and respond to fires– (Lifestyle, poverty, arson)– Evacuation

• How society (and groupings within) prepare for fires– Regulation– (Fire services)

• How experts know about fire and fire safety– Induction from testing and from actual fires– Deduction from theory (eg fluid dynamics)

Page 3: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Regulation

• Origins in major disasters– Great Fire of London 1666 => no thatch, less wood, 2

hour party walls, no projecting roofs– Edinburgh Empire Palace Theatre Fire 1911 => 2½

minutes evacuation time• Insurers and suppliers– National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) origins in

1895 meeting of insurers and sprinkler manufacturers - need for standardisation of sprinkler installation

• Self-regulation?– Comparison with aviation (see John Downer’s work)

Page 4: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Regulatory Barriers• Prescriptive building regulations/codes – to slow fire spread,

aid evacuation, facilitate rescue– Testing geared towards the regulations– Inflexible and not responsive to new materials & building

techniques, limits use of difficult spaces, adds cost

• => Shift from rigid code compliance to Performance Based Design (PBD)– ‘Assess the effects of fire from first principles early in the design’*– Computer power to model fire and smoke fluid dynamics,

structural outcomes, and evacuation behaviour (quantitative and graphic outputs)

*Florian Block, 'Structural Fire Engineering of Unusual Steel Structures'

Page 5: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Performance Based Design Issues: Expertise and Professional Standards

• PBD is more flexible, but needs regulators to have expertise and/or to trust outside review – not just ‘code-checkers’

• Difficult to do if authorities have little expertise

• Problematic if regulators are weak, if professionals lack standards of behaviour, and if link with socially-agreed level of safety is lost – e.g. parts of Australia versus San Francisco’s ‘local equivalencies’ to the code

Page 6: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

* Fleischmann, 2011, 'Is Prescription the Future of Performance-Based Design?'

PBD, Risk, and Judgment

• Acceptable levels of risk– Perceptions vary according to whether seen as voluntary,

controllable, catastrophic– Most deaths in domestic homes but little regulation, whereas

few deaths in high-rise building but heavily regulated– Prescriptive regulations reflect social consensus, outcome of

local governance• PBD can make safety a matter of judgment– ‘guidance is almost exclusively qualitative in nature … can

lead to inconsistent levels of safety’*– Also need judgment on reliability of the science

Page 7: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Learning from Fires

• Complex circumstances (many variables, not controlled), not fully documented

• Rare for some classes of building (eg modern high rises), each example unique (different designs, materials, regulatory regimes, etc)

• Lack of instrumentation

• Evidence more or less destroyed

Page 8: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

* Luke Bisby, March 2011, Ove Arup Foundation interview

Fire Safety Knowledge and Testing• Controlled, but therefore not realistic– Test design – elements tested in isolation– Underlying theoretical assumptions– ‘Similarity judgments’ about whether test is sufficiently

similar to real-world situations• Expensive to build and burn anything like a realistic

building– 1990 Broadgate fire => Cardington tests– 2006 Dalmarnock Glasgow fire tests

• ‘Standard’ tests central to regulatory regimes– ‘test individual components of structures in a fake scenario

with a fake fire’*

Page 9: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Cardington Airship Hanger

Page 10: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

* Luke Bisby, March 2011, Ove Arup Foundation interview

Fire Safety Knowledge and Testing• Controlled, but therefore not realistic– Test design – elements tested in isolation– Underlying theoretical assumptions– ‘Similarity judgments’ about whether test is sufficiently

similar to real-world situations• Expensive to build and burn anything like a realistic

building– 1990 Broadgate fire => Cardington tests– 2006 Dalmarnock Glasgow fire tests

• ‘Standard’ tests central to regulatory regimes– ‘test individual components of structures in a fake scenario

with a fake fire’*

Page 11: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Standard Fire Resistance Test

• Method stems from early Twentieth Century• e.g. ASTM (American Society for Testing and

Materials) E119• Building element (eg column or floor) subject

to heating according to standard fire temperature-time curve

• Does it maintain load-bearing, integrity and insulation for long enough?

Page 12: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Criticism of Standard Fire Test

• ‘The difference between the standard test temperature-time curve and temperature-time curves measured in real compartment fires is considerable.’*– Does not take account of windows, ventilation,

compartment shape and size– Elements tested in isolation though in building will

be joined to other elements thus spreading heat

*Barbara Lane, 2000, 'Performance Based Design for FIre Resistance.'

Page 13: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective
Page 14: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Fire/Smoke Dynamics• Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS)/Smokeview visualisation

software– Widely used for PBD (free, developed by US National Institute of

Standards and Technology)• How good is this software for smoke and fire prediction?

Do users understand limitations?– A priori simulation of Dalmarnock tests showed that ‘current

modelling cannot provide good predictions of HRR [heat release rate] evolution (ie fire growth) in realistic complex scenarios’*

• Powerful tool for demonstration – could visual nature be overly persuasive to non-experts?

* Rein et al, 2009, 'Round-robin study of a priori modelling predictions of the

Dalmarnock Fire Test One’

Page 15: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Performance Based Design Issues:Trade-offs

• Active measures (sprinkler system, smoke control) can allow passive measures to be relaxed (size and height of compartments, distance to exits, fire resistance of materials)

• Enables innovative design, use of difficult spaces (eg new San Francisco Exploratorium in old Pier building)

• But important that active measures have sufficient redundancy (eg sprinklers in domestic housing in California may not work after earthquake)

Page 16: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Fire Safety and Human Behaviour

• Do quantitative simulations used in PBD produce spuriously accurate results?

– Simulation models provide quantitative (and visual) results that may gloss over limited basic understanding (are ‘first principles’ enough?)

– Human behaviour is simplified or ignored

Page 17: Fire  Safety: A Sociological Perspective

Maintaining Fire Safety• Who is responsible for assuring that fire safety features are

maintained during a building’s life?

– In many jurisdictions, regular inspections, including operational demonstrations of equipment

– In UK, shift now to ‘responsible person’ and reliance on fire safety audits

• Critical issue when buildings are modified (eg six deaths in Lakanal House tower block, Camberwell, July 2009)

• PBD-based buildings may incorporate active features that need to be maintained