I'm Eric Rosenbaum, a Vice President with Hughes and Associates, Incorporated, which is a fire protection consulting firm. And today I'll be talking about implementing fire safety designs. I will be concentrating mainly on implementation of fire safety designs in structures and buildings. But the concepts will remain the same no matter what you're pretty much evaluating. What I'll be going over in the presentation, which will be broken down into four different short presentations, are what are the different concepts and options for fire safety design? I'll then be discussing what are the code, or prescriptive-based approaches for the concepts of fire protection. Then I'll be looking at performance or if you define goal objectives. What are performance based design options to meet the intent of what you're trying to do? And then I'll be discussing what are different engineering methods to help you evaluate what's the best design concepts are for fire safety instructors. I'm gonna start the first presentation is on the concepts of fire safety design. And this is, okay, if I have a building or if I have a structure, what do I do to make it fire safe? Or what are the concepts that I can use to make it fire safety, as far approaches, thought processes, what are the different things I'm looking at? I will be giving you an overview of the concepts, discussion of them. Discussion of what are different goals for fire protection or fire safety and design of structures. What are the different approaches for determining what the best fire safety is in the structures, and then discussing some of the resources that are available when you're evaluating fire safety design concepts. When you look at concepts, or how do I evaluate the fire safety in structure, you are looking at, okay, how do I do this? What do I do? Well, the basic thought process is essentially working around this circle, where I first identify, what are my fire hazards? What am I really trying to address? Am I having a warehouse full of flammable liquids that also are radioactive or do I have a bunch of bricks stored in this facility? Clearly the fire hazard associated with flammable liquids is significantly greater than those with a non-combustible brick, or something that doesn't burn. So you have to look at, okay, what is my fire hazard associated with this? From then I can then evaluate, what are my potential consequences associated with this hazard or how can I do? Will I burn the building to the ground if it catches on fire? Or potentially, if it catches on fire, will it have no impact on the people or the structure? And by evaluating these concepts, or what the potential consequences are, I can then identify, okay, what are the potential methods to address these hazards or consequences? And by identifying what methods or potential issues can I use to address these hazards, then I can evaluate the impact of these methods on the consequences. So if I have bricks in the building, my method to protect this structure may be not to worry about it. Whereas if I have a flammable liquid in the building, I may introduce a foam system. Or some other kind of fire safety system that will limit the impact. I can then look at, okay, do I install a bunch of different options or protection methods? And I can select, based on all these issues, I can then select what are the protection options that best suit my needs? What do I mean by protection options? And these have been discussed earlier in different presentations. And they can include anything from automatic sprinklers, which you see installed in many buildings. And automatic sprinklers, here's a picture of one right here going off. What they have is they have a kind of detection device installed within them that makes it so that it senses heat. And when it gets really hot up where the sprinkler is, this device melts and the water explodes and the water will come out and extinguish the fire. Not only does it extinguish or control the fire, it will also set off an alarm for when the water flows through the system. So I notify the people in the building that there's a fire. I notify the fire department that there's a fire, and they can potentially come and address it. So these sprinklers perform not only a method to control the fire, but also to detect and alert the occupants and fire department. And that ties directly into an alarm or mass communication system where you then have a method for allowing people to get out of the building or alerting them to a fire so they can move to another section of the building and be alert of what is going on. Now once you alert people, they have to get out of the building so you provide exits or you provide a place for these people to go and wait safely. So the number of exits and where you provide them is directly driven by the kind of occupant. You will provide more exits typically in a convention center than you would in a hospital where the convention center, you have a lot of people who are capable of moving out of the structure if there's a fire. As opposed to a hospital where you don't have a lot of people and the people aren't capable of evacuating themselves through the exits. So, you just might move them to another safe area in the building. So these are all protection options. You also have smoke control, which may be passive, such as building a barrier with a door in it, and smoke dampers so that smoke can't move from one side of the barrier to another. Or you may have active smoke control, which may consist of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning unit taking the smoke and evacuating it to outside the building. So you have different methods of smoke control, as well as structural features. You may have a building that has and is built of non-combustible construction and It may be a steel building. Well, if you have a regular steel building with no protection on the steel features, and about 10 to 15 minutes of fire exposure, that steel will probably fail. So you may have collapse of your structure. So, depending on what you have in that building and the size of your building, if you're a high-rise building and you don't want your structure collapsing and it's made of steel. You will actually protect that steel so that you get multiple hours of fire protection. So that you can actually have all the contents of that building burn out, without the structure collapsing to allow all the people to evacuate, or to stay in place up above it. So those are different things. There are also other methods or fire safety design concepts, and those can include anything from limiting the fuel load within the structure. To many other clever and unique ways to providing fire safety that will all meet the potential needs of the stakeholders, or the user, or whatever you have governing that building. Now, when you talk about goals or determining what fire safety needs in your building, there are typical many goals associated with fire safety instructors. And the fundamental goals are the ones that are almost included in every structure. Those can include life safety, such as getting the people out or evacuating them to an area of safety. You almost always want to make sure that people are safe if there's a fire. The only exceptions are buildings, some buildings are almost totally unoccupied. Or some buildings have such high property protection issues in them, that property protection may become a more major issue. You still worry about life safety, but property protection may become the number one issue. And what do I mean by property protection? Well, if you have a art gallery where you have priceless paintings. Or if you have some other form of property that you have a storage warehouse that is never occupied, but contains pharmaceuticals. Property protection of that facility is almost paramount to what you're dealing with as far as dealing with the fire safety concepts. Another important thing is the continuity of operations. There are some manufacturing plants that are worth millions of dollars of days to the owners, so they wanna make sure that you maintain the continuity of operations. Not only would that be in a manufacturing facility, but, for example, certain art galleries like to be known to be open 365 days a year. And it's important to them to know that if they have a fire they will have continuity or be able to be open the next day. And environmental protection is almost always a major issue, but it really comes to a highlight in cases where you may have radioactive wastes stored in the facility. So you wanna make sure that you provide fire protection in such a way so that if there's a fire, radioactive wastes don't spread through the plume or through other portions. Through the fire products or smoke, outside of the facility and expose the neighbors around the facility. Other goals of fire protection may be just strictly code compliance. The owner want to make sure that's he's covered so he complies with code. And I put up there reduce costs. I don't know of any building that's been built where they say money is no object. You always have to design or come up with a fire protection scheme that was in the owner's budget and allows the building to be built. You don't wanna come up with a scheme that results in costs for the fire protection, that greatly exceed the budget that's allowed for the building. Flexibility of the use of the building is a major issue, as well as limiting damage to the historic fabric. If you have a historic building, such as National Gallery of Art or the Statue of Liberty, they don't want you doing things that will damage this historic fabric, such as building a stair outside the mouth of the Statue of Liberty so the people can exit. You always have to incorporate those goals in your fire safety concepts. Now when you look at a structure, different things, it's not only fire safety. There are different items that come into play. And life safety is a fire safety issue. But you have to remember, life safety is getting people out of the building as quickly as you can. In an art gallery or something else where they have high security issues, they don't want people being able to leave the building easily. So they might go, okay, security is also a major issue, or the building architecture, or they may have such a design so they don't want the aesthetic impact of the fire protection effecting the appreciation of the concepts of the building. And there's some Library of Congress buildings that are just absolutely beautiful inside. You don't want the insulation of a sprinkler system or some other element making it so that you can't appreciate the aesthetics of the building. So you have to make sure that it's incorporated there or that the fire safety approach doesn't affect the building operations. That the owner can still utilize the building that way that he feels is appropriate. Now when you look at okay, who inputs to what is the appropriate fire protection scheme for the building? There may be several different elements that you're looking at. Yet, I as a fire protection engineer like to think that I make all the final decisions relative to fire safety. But I know that's not the case. It doesn't happen that way. I provide some of the input. I also have to look at, okay is the architect or the engineer or the designer of the building not going to appreciate my approach to fire protection? Or will the owner and user say this doesn't achieve what we're trying to do with the concepts or the use of the building? So by doing that fire protection I may as well as not use the building and not build it. And there's always an authority having jurisdiction whether it's a federal agency, a local building official, a local fire marshall. There will always be someone who is looking at it for fire safety, for the public's needs and for the different people who may be occupying it. All these people are stakeholders, end up having to provide input for fire safety design. There are also different methods to look at fire protection or fire safety concepts in buildings and I'll go into more of these in the future modules. But there's a code or prescriptive approach which is, for a typical office building such as this, which is a square building, you can provide exits. And you can pretty much provide a code compliant approach to the building. So you would look at it and say, okay, this is how many exits I can provide. This is where they need to discharge. This is the sprinkler system. These are the different smoke control systems. This is the way I evacuate people. These are pretty straightforward concepts that are used in a typical building, and they're all code or prescriptive-based or laid out like a cookbook. For unique buildings such as these two, you may have to come up with a unique design concept that will be outside of the building code or outside of what is typically accepted, and those are called performance-based approaches. And when you're looking at the overall level of code compliance, you have to look at several different things and one of them may be the level of code compliance of the structure. Is it code compliant? How do I do it? Or the ability to meet the goals and objectives in a performance based approach. Can I meet the fire safety goals and objectives that I developed? You may also look at the appropriateness for the area of the building protected. Now what do I mean by this? Well, if you have flammable liquids that you're protecting, it may not be appropriate to use water as your protection method. You may choose to use a foam or some other kind of system that won't interact with the flammable liquids and potentially make a fire worse. You also have to look at the reliability. You don't wanna depend on one system so that if it fails, your fire safety design for the building doesn't work anymore. You're exposing the occupants if you have a single failure. You have to look at the severity of the fire hazards and the feasibility and cost of your approach. Is it feasible to install that fire safety design, and is the cost reasonable? Do you get appropriate bang for your buck? And engineering judgment. I've seen tons of things burn. I've seen tons of ways of protection for structures. Okay, if I see that and yet, there's something, the code says it's reasonable but I've seen that fail many times. I have to use my engineering judgement to say, I wanna use a different approach. And to give you an example, this is the National Gallery of Art. In the National Gallery of Art building. It's a historic structure that has priceless connections in it, collections. The artwork is amazing and you don't wanna damage that ever by your fire protection systems or by a fire. So you have to come up with approaches that will meet, not only my goals and objectives for protecting the people, protection of the collections, protection of the building, but you also have to make sure that they're cost effective so that you can afford to install them. There are a couple of documents that provide guidance on fire protection. These are big documents. This is the Fire Protection Handbook. This is one of two volumes, to give you an idea of the size of the documents. These will give you great insight onto how to address fire safety. Another one is the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, Fire Protection Handbook. This is another document, it provides calculations and methods to determine fire safety. Again, this is a Fire Protection Handbook and this is published by the National Fire Protection Association. So in summary, concepts. There are many options for fire protection. The stakeholders or the people who are involved in the building need to provide input for the choice to be effective. There are two approaches to fire protection, code/prescriptive and performance. And handbooks exist to help you provide what is a fire safety approach.
