Fire Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Fire Report - Essay Example Now fires in Tall buildings have become a prominent possible reason for collateral damage of both life and finances. These structures pose an equal threat to the neighboring structures as well. The only reason that designer didn’t previously considered it as a potential threat was that occurrence of these events are very less. But detailed studies after the WTC event have shown immense levels of flaws in the fire protection systems of tall buildings. The recent examples of fires resulting into complete collapse are the WTC 1, 2 and 7. Then the complete collapse of Apartment Block in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 3.2002, then Jackson Street apartments in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in Feb 8,2002. A list of collapses has been provided in the Appendix 2 of all the collapse that was seen in the past. The concept of fire proof construction is that the despite the complete burnout of the structure, the structure must not collapse at any cost. For this there are two steps that are tak en by the standards and other implementation bodies. Firstly the building should be resistant to fire for a certain level which about 3 hrs, this is done to safeguard from the collapse of structure and secondly an effective fire protection system should be in place, which is present for the purpose of detection, fire fighting and for effective evacuation of inhabitants. At present the only International Building Code IBC 2006 solely has prescriptive fire resistance construction regulations and bounds the designer to follow it for protection of structure against fire. IBC is also supported by National Fire Protection Association and other similar organization, which I have discussed in detail in later sections. The Approach of this report would be very similar to the process involved in designing a fire resistant Tall building with effective fire protection system. Characteristic of Tall Buildings As we are well aware of the processes through which the fire protection facility is bro ught into commission, where the first phase is the analysis and requirement determination of the fire protection, then the second is the design of these required systems, the third is the construction and finally the maintenance and operations of these systems. Before the commencement of the design phase of a fire protection system the first and foremost step is to evaluate and analyze the building features and when does it become of detrimental to design a prefect system. What are the different category of buildings and the types of construction. The first and basic categorization is on the basis of number of stories, under which the building which has more than 7 stories is declared as tall building. Then these tall building or high rise building are subdivided into four property classes, where first is Apartment Buildings, second being Hotels, Hospitals and other facilities that care for the sick and Office Buildings being the third and fourth type. On the other hand the discrimi nation is made on the basis of construction material. According to National Fire Protection Association, (NFPA 220, 2006) there are two basic types of construction: it either burns (combustible) or it does not (noncombustible). These types of construction can be further broken down into five categories. Type I is fire-resistive construction which majorly consists of materials such as