The Fire in the Built Environment - Dissertation Example

Word count: 2437 The Fire in the Built Environment Introduction The population of earth at the start of 21st century was reported as 6.3 billion and among them nearly 7 to 8 million are reported to have experienced some form of fire related accident. The total number of accidents reported across the world at the same instant of time was 80,000 fire deaths with 8 million fire injuries. The Europe which report to have a population of 0.7 billion alone have about 2 to 2.5 million people with experience of fire incident. The number of fire deaths and fire related injuries in this region is documented as 25,000 and 0.5 million respectively (Wagner, 2006). The statistics available across the world shows that 80 percent of the fire deaths are caused by the fire originated in the dwelling units and is followed by the fire related fatality in other building which is accounted for another 10 percent (Wagner, 2006). The other type of fire incidents like those reported in vehicles, transport systems, forests and all others account for the remaining 10 percent of the fire related deaths across the world. The economical and statistical evaluation of the fire also shows that 26 percent is usually attributed to the direct lose category and 5 percent as the indirect losses. Providing fire protection systems in building would require 35 %, the service cost of the fire service personal is 20 percent and fire insurance forms the 14 percent. Among the request received through the telephone calls to the respective rescue team in each country, 61 percent of the total calls are found to seek the medical support. Nearly 10 percent of the calls are reported as false calls too (Wagner, 2006). 2. Comparisons of Fire risks: US, UK, France and Germany. The costs of fires are very enormous irrespective of the people, region or the country affected by fire. The community have significant role to reduce the consequences and the impact of accidents caused by the fire. The works of the fire and rescue teams are made more effective by establishing the cooperative action with the local community. But before initiating any such activity it is very vital to identify the risks inherent in them. The risk assessment and risk appreciation also have different ways and means across different countries. The risk of fire in the four leading global economies United States of America, United Kingdom, France and Germany had shown considerable change across last 25 years. During the early 1960s the risk if fire in United States was reported to be very high when compared with the European countries (Wagner, 2006). The European countries of United Kingdom, Russia and Germany did not report very high risk of fire at the same period of time. The risk of fire in U.S.A. declined drastically over the period and is presently at less than the half the risk now from those experienced during the 1960s. Still these figures are much higher than those reported for the Europe. Europe on the other hand even though had a very low risk levels , still reels at the same risk level without any significant reduction levels (Wagner, 2006). 2.1 Review of fire incidents in United States. United States reports the highest level of fire related incidents across all the countries. The efforts made by the U.S. administration to contain the rising rate of fire related accidents have often been challenged by variety of factors. In addition to the regular accidental fire and explosion fire has also become a major point of attention after the World Trade centre disaster. United Sates having a reported population that is four time more than the other three countries considered here have highest level of reported fire related deaths. On an average the reported values of 3925 per year is slightly higher even when the population proportions are considered. Also, about 52 to 53 percent of the fire related accidents in United States are caused either in building units or by vehicles. The relative portion of those occurring in the building units and vehicle fire are given as 33 and 19 respectively. It is also seen that these values have remained stationery over last few years (CTIF, 2006). 2.2 Review of fire incidents in United Kingdom In United Kingdom the majority of faire related incident are found to occur inside the building units. The available figure reports that about 33 % of the fire related incidents in the entire UK is in the building units and about 30 % of the fire accidents are caused by the vehicles. The data indicating this shows that nearly 8 lakh fire related incident happens all over U.K and with reported casualty levels of nearly 500 (DCLG, 2007). It is also understood that the elderly are the most affected by the fire as they are the groups who are found indoors for a longer period of time. Among the nature of fires that takes place the accidental fires are reported to be the maximum. The intervention of fire and rescue services along with the appropriate awareness initiative have helped to reduce the reported causality levels significantly. Another major intervention is the issue of statutory regulation in United Kingdom to reduce the rising fire related casualties to undertake the risk assessment in the buildings that houses more than five persons. This has helped to identify the vulnerable points in that particular building and hence initiate appropriate modifications to prevent any fire hazard (DCLG,2007). The primary reason identified for the fire is mostly accidental and is found to have declining trend. The separate regional and demographic variations in the countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland shows wide variation in the reported incidents on fire from the above countries. 2.3 Review of fire incidents in Germany The statistics available from Germany on fire related incidents show that nearly 600 fatalities are reported annually. Among these 75 percent of these are from the fire damage caused in the homes. In addition to the figures representing the fatality rates, nearly 6000 seriously injured and 60000 less severely injured are reported. In addition to these the economic loss generated from fire damages in Germany was also enormous. Total estimated value of the damages was nearly 6000 million Euro (Vfdb,2003). Among this figure , nearly 1500 million Euro was the compensation paid by various insurance companies for the damages caused by fire. The fire brigades in Germany consist of strong team of both professional and corporate fire brigades. In addition 1 million people including both men and women are working as voluntary part time services with the fire brigades. Germany plan to reduce the number of fire fatalities and related injuries along with the economic losses associated with fire by 20 percent across the next 10 years (Vfdb, 2003). The major problem that Germany faces in managing the fire safety are the absence of reliable statistics on the fire related incidents and fire safety requirements. Though it is mentioned through literature that for the last 30 years the efforts to prepare statistics was in place but couldnt attain good success. The government interventions too have failed miserably in this are of action which cripples all the analysis required for evolving long term fire safety policies in Germany (Vfdb, 2003). In addition, the absence of standard test procedures that could assess the material quality of fire safety products and hence leading to the standardization of practices need to be planned . 2.4 Review of fire incidents in France The fire safety aspect in the buildings in France is decided based on the purpose to which the building is put to and is regulated by the respective ministries under which the building is incorporated. The fragmentation of responsibilities on fire safety aspect has led to the inconsistent designs and widely varying risk levels (Kruppa, n.d.). The alternate design of building considering the fire safety aspect has been brought into force in France since 1999. France with a population of 60 million reports an average fire related deaths as 500 (CTIF, 2006). The average number of deaths have not risen above these figures as obtained from the available reports. On the distribution of fires, it is observed that about 15.7 % percent of fires are caused in the building units and vehicles have a share of nearly 17.5 of the fire (CTIF, 2006). Another location is grasslands were 27 % of fire is said to originates. The above-indicated percentages were for the period during early 2000. The recent figure (after 2005) shows that the French government has successfully reduced the grassland fires to just 20 %. And now the structural fires are to be more significant having a proportion of nearly 25 %. The vehicles are found to cause fires in 18 % of cases says the report. Thus more than 50 percent of the fire cases are caused either in building units or in vehicles and also 95 percent of fire related deaths are from this group (CTIF, 2006). 3. Fire safety interventions in built environment. All the new buildings designed for any function need to satisfy the fire safety norms stated in the appropriate building codes. It is known that most of the countries have fires safety norms incorporated under building ordinances as well as under fire safety ordinances thus ensuring the protection of people residing indoors against any type of fire. The conventional designs of building spaces being undertaken with the help of fire safety codes (Lo et al, 2002). And these codes have become of very limited values when the buildings turned very complex using newer type of building materials. In order to eliminate these issues the new approaches using the system design have been applied in the fire safety design of buildings using performance criteria. Such an approach has been demonstrated to be very successful to ensure the adequate level of safety in buildings against fire. And thus the performance based approach claims to ensure the adequate level of safety in any building (Lo et al, 2002). The final judgment of using the fire control systems need to be made by the officials dealing with the fire safety in the building unit. The research undertaken has established the requirement to use the performance based designs confirms the need to use such type of approach in line with the improvements in the building technology. Another major intervention that could be made is the better planning of Available Safe Egress Time (ASET). The data available from the various studies undertaken earlier have shown that the Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) , in most of the cases, is often higher than the Available Safe Egress Time (ASET). The ASET values indicate the minimum time required for a specified amount of the fire prone materials to reach and expose the people with fire. While, RSET is the time required for the fire exposed person to reach the place of safety often outside the building. Thus the time to escape from a building is one of the vital requirements that is necessary to building safety. The research undertaken by Hall (2004) tries to address the question that how many of the victim could have been saved if proper design consideration could have been given on time to escape in case of fire. The results obtained from the research showed that atleast two thirds of the people injured by fire could have been saved if the aforementioned parameter was properly addressed. In the cases considered it is understood that a few of the people were asleep when the tragedy struck. and hence needed a operational smoke alarm. 4. Summary It is understood from the comparative studies undertaken across four different countries that usually the most of the opinion of the fire brigades are not taken into serious considerations when evolving policies or guidelines of action for fire safety in dwelling units. Such a scenario was evolved because of the absence of proper facts on the recommendations provided hence the fire brigades or rescue services team must be able to furnish proper factual information in support of their claims. Most of the country states have highly unpredicted and unorganized demographic distribution which have made the fire and rescue intervention very difficult even in the case of emergency. In addition to the above reason the proper implementation of the policies requires monetary support from the administration which is virtually the missing component in most of the fire administration departments. In addition the changes that take place in the perception of fire risks and the emergency service risks also aggravate the problem in fire safety management. 5. Recommendations The common belief of making strict regulations the requirement to reduce the fire related accidents is not very proper. It has been observed from the earlier research that the change in the legislation on controlling the sale of fire works have not led to any higher rate of fire injuries or fire related incidents. The two year studies undertaken after the change in legislation did not show any significant rise in the accident rates (Fogarty and Gorden, 1999).. Thus, it is understood that most of the fire related incidents are accidental or due to individual errors. It must also be observed that most of the fire related accidents are in the building units across all the countries. Hence, better initiatives to ignore a risk assessment processes in all the dwelling units shall be undertaken as mandatory exercise to identify the prime areas that needs immediate intervention. Thus increased extension works need to be given major emphasis in order to achieve large scale improvement in fire related injuries in these countries. Another major focus shall be on the having a close monitoring on the people staying indoors permanently, like those in the elderly age group. Thus understanding the needs of different people in the building units and evolving appropriate intervention styles could also bring large scale reduction in fire related fatality rates. Finally, the fire safety design concepts like performance based engineering approach are found to be feasible for majority of complex and huge buildings. According to this approach the individual building design along with the anticipated use is taken simultaneously to come up with various initiatives to reduce the cost and thus saving significantly when compared with traditional methods. These techniques could ensue atleast 2 to 3 percent reduction in cost as per the information available from the countries like Australia and USA. A comprehensive fire safety plan could be evolved considering the development in built environment towards ensuring better health and safety of the occupants. References CITF (2006), Centre for Fire statistics : World fire statistics [Online] Available from [Accessed on 5 December 2009] DCLG (2007), The fire statistics, United Kingdom, 2005 [Online] available at [Accessed on 4 December 2009] Fogarty, B.J. and Gorden, D.J. (1999) Firework related injury and legislation: the epidemiology of firework injuries and the effect of legislation in Northern Ireland, Burns, 25(1), pp 53-56. Hall, J.R. (2004), How Many People Can Be Saved from Home Fires if Given More Time to Escape?, Fire Technology, 40(2), pp 117-126. Jordan, L.B, Squires, T.J. and Busuttil, A (1999) Incidence trends in house fire fatalities in eastern Scotland , Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine,6(4), pp 233 - 237. Kruppa, J (n.d.), Fire Safety Engineering in France: Current Practice and Foreseen Evolution [Online] Available from [Accessed on 6 December 2009] Lo, S.M., Lam, K.C., Yuen, K.K. and Fang, Z (2002), An Investigation on the Building Officials Perception for the Use of Performance-Based Fire Engineering Approach in Building Design , Fire Engineering, 38(3), pp 271-286. Vfdb (2003), German Fire Protection Association, [Online] Available from [accessed on 5 December 2009] Wagner, I.P (2006), World fire statistics, [Online] Available from [Accessed on 4 December 2009] Read More