The Mole- November 2009

As the Mole began typing this column, seven Dallas fire-fighters had been hospitalised after attending a blaze at a residential construction site in a fashionable area to the north of the city. Exhaustion prompted chiefs to rotate personnel as 140 crew, some using thermal imaging equipment, struggled to contain the incident with walls collapsing around them. The untenanted building was approximately 65% complete and sprinklers had been installed in parts but not all of the complex.

Challenges at partially-completed structures
Christopher J. Naum of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers is widely respected for his work in New York, Washington and abroad on fire-fighting safety at construction sites as well as risk management in situations involving possible structural collapse. When a building is finished, facilities managers can implement optimum fire detection and preventative equipment. But as Naum has noted, the construction process - as demonstrated recently in Dallas - is the period of a building's life cycle when it presents
the highest potential threat and when the suppression and control concerns of fire authorities should be most acute. Limited access points, temporary fencing, the presence of cranes, scaffolding, exposed electrical lines, partially-completedtrenches, unprotected steel components and stockpiles of inflammable toxic materials all present abnormal dangers. Of course there is no magic bullet and a fire at a building site will always be fraught with challenges, but risk can be reduced if architects and civil engineers exchange information with municipal fire authorities throughout the construction phase, ensuring that all parties communicate openly. With events in Dallas as a springboard, the Mole has been considering other environments where conditions are unusual and fire-fighters face exceptional responsibilities. In the UK, around
20 schools a week are damaged by fire, with arson accounting for three quarters of the incidents and the cost of repairs last year alone running to $110m.

One percent of total outlay
And yet less than 500 of the UK's 32,000 schools have fire sprinklers. More incredible still, only 43% of educational premises to have been rebuilt or refurbished under the much-vaunted Building Schools for the Future programme have sprinkler systems. Meanwhile, the Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA) is calling for the devices to be mandatory in all new-build school premises. The association takes a holistic view and points not only to financial costs but to the disruption inflicted on social groups. Every school fire brings its own array of upheaval and lost opportunities. The CFOA also argues that if sprinklers are factored in at design stage the costs can be kept as low as 1% of total outlay. In contrast with the short-sightedness of UK policy mandarins, the California Legislature is in the vanguard of specifying such systems at its K-12  kindergarten through 12th grade] state-run schools, with fire alarms being connected to approved supervising stations. Stringent demands are being made for  improvements to existing schools with statutory requirements for new-build projects. The initiative has been prompted by a fire at East Palo Alto's Green Oaks Elementary where an entire wing burned to the ground without any loss of life or even injury.

Protecting the most vulnerable
Any fire at an institution for the vulnerable is distressing, but few incidents this decade have been more heartrending than the death of 38 people at a drug abuse clinic in Kazakhstan late in the summer of 2009. The centre already had a history of safety violations and eyewitnesses reported how patients tried to escape through the barred windows of the 1950s Soviet-era building. There were also reports of locked doors on wards. The building had no alarm system and a statement by the country's
Emergencies Ministry admitted that fire fighters had been summoned late. Two of the dead were staff and the rest patients. In our last edition the Mole reported on an  embarrassing blaze at an airport's own fire-fighting facility in Louisiana. Thoughts of a similar incident would have been far from the mind of the Mayor of Los Angeles as he opened a $13.5m airport rescue and firefighting facility at the city's International Airport (LAX.). With seven bays where rescue vehicles will be housed and maintained, the
facility covers 27,500 square feet and even includes living areas for 14 fire-fighters during their 24-hour shifts.

The development is a significant example of how expenditure on improving emergency services is contributing to economic regeneration, with officials estimating that when in full operational mode the facility will create 200 jobs.Take your stand on passive protection While the discussion above has covered major incidents across international infrastructure, it should be stressed that this magazine is in no way restricted to the active market, and the Mole asks readers to contribute editorial and letters on every aspect of passive protection. With IT equipment proving a major focus for manufacturers of fixed extinguishing systems, we are encouraging debate on these pages as to preferred approaches. Aerosol is enjoying demonstrable success in protecting computer server rooms and significantly reduces the residue problems associated with dry chemical agents. But it is hardly a panacea. Similarly, gaseous ‘total flooding' and water mist (both high and low pressure) have produced success stories in machinery space, while carbon dioxide remains an effective medium for normally unoccupied areas though the requirement for ventilated storage will always be onerous for facility managers. These same managers are now benefiting from the advent of the ‘intelligentbuilding' with other life-critical disciplines such as voice alarm and access control reporting effectively to centralised monitoring software, often using a building's IT conduit. Fire detection and alarm systems need to keep pace.

This magazine may well hit your desk as world leaders debate climate change at a United Nations summit in Copenhagen. The ‘greenhouse' implications of Halon 1301 may be less of a hot otato than they were a decade ago but the fire community must continue to evaluate the dozen or so gaseous agents that have been touted as Halon substitutes, assessing their suitability across various sectors. Please send issue rather than product-based editorial on this and all the subjects discussed by the Mole to info@firebuyer.com. As for the future of the planet, we are not looking for harbingers of gloom but a balanced view of the situation, a snapshot of both the ozone-depleting aspects of products used in the fire sector and areas where we have progressed and deserve credit as an industry.