Fire Safety Engineering

Fire safety engineering is one of the most modern strains in the engineering profession, which is probably not well understood by many building owners and occupiers.  Fire safety engineering provides a purpose built fire engineered solution to address the potential risk of fire in a given situation.  This could be applied in an industrial process, a unique building design or a unique fire risk.

Fire safety engineering has grown in prominence since the introduction of performance based building codes.  Basically this allows building designers to modify the fire protection provided to a new or refurbished structure as long as a design is submitted that demonstrates that safety of the building is not compromised. 

However, performance based designs are now being used prominently by building designers and developers to save costs in a new building construction or refurbishment.  There are a number of concerns with this development:

• The building code is predominantly a life safety code and whilst a performance based design may ensure that building occupants are safe, the proposed alternative design may provide a significantly reduced level of property protection compared to the prescriptive code, which will have impacts for insurers;
• The complexity of an alternative design will impact on its ability to achieve its objective in a fire situation.  For example, where human intervention is included in the design, then asumptions are made about how people will react in a fire situation; and
• Ongoing maintenance of a unique design often requires specialist knowledge, which may be lost over a period of time as building management changes.

RiskTech does not produce fire engineered designs.  Rather, with their knowledge of the fire engineering process, the insurance industry and the regulatory requirements for building approval, they can assist building designers, occupiers and developers during the design stage to ensure the proposed fire protection meets all objectives required by the relevant stakeholders.

Some of the benefits of this process will be:

• RiskTech will ensure that not only are building regulations met in the proposed design, but also that the insurance implications of the design are also considered; and
• RiskTech can often mediate between building developers, occupiers and owners to ensure that all stakeholders understand the issues and can achieve their collective objectives.