Fire safety
What sort of built environment do we want for the future? When you look at the built environment over the past 20 years, we have created many buildings that are not resilient to fire and we continue to build them. While the best approach to fire safety is not to have a fire in the first instance, it’s important that we ask the question: what sort of built environment do we want in the future? Iain Cox, chairman of the Business Sprinkler Alliance, discusses According to authors Raynor & Mumtaz, enjoyment spaces they contain? In terms of writing in the Harvard Business Review business, the trend line on losses continues (April 2013), they identified three business to rise despite adjustments in the number rules that were typical of exceptional of fires. In the new, vibrant UK economy companies: better before cheaper; competing and trading with the revenue before cost; and, thirdly, world, can we afford not to there are no other rules. invest in resilience? We It’s become apparent that should not confuse the The the building industry in short-term economic constru the UK has reversed the boost of rebuilding c t i i o n n dustry h sentiment of these rules with the longkeen on as been so and we, as a country, term impact of sustain are paying the price. lost opportunity, ability it has fo Of course, change does relocation, impact r g o tten about s take time. Looking back on business afety an at safety in cars, the seat confidence r e s i l ience d belt was invented as far and employee back as 1885 but in the welfare. The recent UK it was only required to be bushfires in Australia worn by law nearly a century have only served to later. Interestingly, airbags were highlight the real cost of developed in the early 1950s and while they fire beyond the insurance claims. are a feature of all modern cars, this safety Does this mean that people and businesses solution is still not a legal requirement - but a will do the right thing to invest to protect car could not receive a safety rating without themselves? It’s an admirable aspiration one. Compare this to the built environment but the hard reality is that they follow today and a business considering fire what they interpret to be the regulatory safety; the minimum building standards minimums. The public and business are designed to preserve human life, not owners see claims of compliance with to ensure the resilience of the building. regulations as an assurance of safety We must therefore question what value and protection from fire. They therefore we place on the resilience of the built think they are building, or purchasing, environment and the businesses, homes and resilience when in fact they are not.
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Looking ahead Firstly, buildings must be people-proof. If a building relies on complex ‘management arrangements’ for safety, human nature is such that they will fail at some point. Buildings must also be adaptable as they will inevitably be used for differing purposes in their lifespan. For example, old dock warehouses are now being repurposed as indoor paintball arenas, something that was never in the architect’s mind in the 1930s. Furthermore, buildings must be risk-proofed. They should be designed to withstand the risks they will be exposed to whether that is fire, flood, theft, earthquake or storm, etc. Too often a building is conceived without due consideration as to impact of those risks over the life of the building. The construction industry has been so keen on sustainability it has forgotten about safety and resilience. Green rating systems and regulations may well recognise a high-performance building but if it’s not built to withstand fire, this will nullify the benefits gained from green construction. A fire that destroyed a newly-opened warehouse in Daventry – and one that had a high BREEAM rating for its renewable carbon technologies – had far reaching consequences, with rebuild costs of £30 million and the eventual sale of the Gardman garden supplies business. This raises a fundamental issue about how
