Fire Casualties On The Rise And Mostly Unattended

Taslim Ahammad :
The cost of reckless fires in business and residence in terms of both human lives and damage to property is always a high one. Each time straight losses due to fires are a lot. It is very common in Bangladesh to violate fire codes that regularly result in the deaths of many citizens and damage to properties. The concern of negligence in ensuring fire safety measures and rampant breach of the existing building law and code are increasing fire incidents in Dhaka, Narayanganj and other big cities.
To reduce such losses, it is significant to be able to both understand and quantify the behaviour and consequences of building fires in practice. A suitable fire safety design should ensure occupant safety at first as building fire occurs.
Also, fragile audit and monitoring by the authorities/officials concerned regarding fire protection and irregularities in clearing multi-storey building projects lack of proper or minimum fire safety standards, for the situation. Hence, the fire service needs to increase the capacity of its manpower and logistic support, to help ward off any worse situation. Most importantly it is necessary to make sure regular fire drill and audit.
It is essential to improve a complete and accepted fire safety assessment method for multi-purpose structures. The business and residential fire safety assessment criteria are carefully related to the reasons of fires, playing an essential role in the development of a fire safety assessment system.
The design working life of a reinforced concrete structure depends on: (i) The location of the structure and its expected environmental conditions. (ii) Conceptual and structural design, detailing, intended use and level of maintenance (iii) Materials’ specification and properties (iv) Appropriate method of construction.
In endeavouring to design buildings for fire safety, whether in the context of design of individual buildings and business (as might be done by a fire safety expert) or in designing building regulations that are intended to cover broad classes of buildings (as might be done by building and other structure regulatory bodies), it is a basic requirement that the designers have an appreciation of the situations in which unwanted events (such as damage to property, injury and death) occur and the frequencies at which they occur.
Also, there are a lot of reasons such as fuel faces and building environment which dominate fire spread and smoke movement. For an assumed building, the operational reliability of fire protection system is an important powerful cause. In some fire risk examination it is simply assumed that a system will function effectively. In order to attain more reasonable effects, operational reliability of fire protection system should be measured in risk assessment procedure.
Various aspects are to be developed, many of which have been discussed above in this work, also the basic parameters of fire scenarios, smoke toxicity of materials, interaction between fire protection systems and fires, fire growth behaviour and the movement of smoke in buildings, human behaviour in fire crises, techniques of performance-based fire protection design and fire risk assessment for special buildings.
The first step to assess the fire safety level of such present building is to assess whether the building in use is in all aspects in compliance with the doctrinaire fire safety codes and the level of maintenance of the building is adequate. However, most of the buildings are normally constructed to the ”old” prescriptive requirements, and the safety level provided in these buildings might not be the similar as the standard enforced today. Examination on the basis of current prescriptive requirements may cause such buildings to be regarded as ”sub-standard”. On the other hand, whether such ”sub-standard” warrants immediate improvement action.
Safety, with respect to evacuation, need to measure in time, mostly the time required for all occupiers to reach the outside of a property. The structural design of modern tall buildings is directed by the need to professionally transfer loading, particularly that from wind, whilst providing increasingly complex building and property functionality.
With difference to traditional assets assessment, some uncertainties of evacuation time and the onset time to untenable conditions are considered in the risk assessment for evacuees discussed in this study. For evacuation time assessment, occupant pre-movement time is characterized by normal distribution. For the onset time to untenable conditions assessment, its uncertainty is proposed with consideration of the range of design fires according to different fire growth rates. Understanding fire safety and the prevention of fires is critical, hence, necessary in all areas. Hence, an outline of analysis on fire safety design based on risk assessment and management also super suitable decision theory or model need to have each building or property.

(Mr. Taslim Ahammad is Assistant Professor, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology
University, Gopalganj).