The likelihood and cost/benefit analysis is a debate that should be happening at the building code development and adoption phases when determining what the minimum code requirements should be in the building codes and standards.
You may want to consider that public buildings that are funded by taxpayers are a community investment of resources which should be protected against fire and other hazards to be more resilient and durable to make the most of the investment of community resources, especially since reconstructing a new public building in future dollars is generally more expensive. Fire and other natural disasters like earthquakes can be a low likelihood event when considering building code requirements, but when it happens, we don't want to rebuild from scratch, especially when it comes to big buildings and important buildings. Fires can also be an immediate secondary event after an earthquake where multiple simultaneous fires occur to add to the chaos and destruction with emergency services stretched thin... and other things like this happen as reported at http://www.historynet.com/the-great-1906-san-francisco-earthquake-and-fire.htm: "One of the first casualties was Fire Chief Engineer Dennis T. Sullivan, who was mortally wounded when a chimney from the California Theater smashed without warning into the fire station where he was living. The fire department, faced with the greatest crisis in its history, was effectively decapitated." Predicting how owners will actually use the building and what future contents will be in the building is hard. I would point out that in many cases, public school buildings that were not designed as emergency shelters are often used as emergency shelters and can be found with various other potentially unanticipated uses ranging from voting stations to weekend religious services to student sleep-ins. I would also highlight that NFPA 13 annex guidance on storage commodity classifications finally/recently changed to catch up with the reality of modern storage and packaging due to the uses of higher BTU plastics replacing the traditional materials prevalent when the previous annex guidance was first put in the standard. On a relate note, we have even had difficulties in the past convincing some local jurisdictions that resisted protecting fire stations with fire sprinklers when the building codes clearly require them to be sprinklered [when budget concerns and possibly some fire service hubris combined]. We had to educate them on both the legal requirements and the reasoning behind the code requirements and the political reality of trying to get it rebuilt if it did burn down after we had told them it was required to be protected by sprinklers... PS: Google fires in fire stations to get link to articles like this: http://mentalfloss.com/article/22704/do-fire-stations-ever-catch-fire Respectfully, David Blackwell David Blackwell, P.E. Chief Engineer (803)896-9833 Office of State Fire Marshal 141 Monticello Trail | Columbia, SC 29203 http://statefire.llr.sc.gov/ (803)896-9800 "Our firefighting starts with plan review..." From: Sprinklerforum [mailto:sprinklerforum-boun...@lists.firesprinkler.org] On Behalf Of å... .... Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2018 1:18 AM To: sprinklerforum@lists.firesprinkler.org Subject: High School Weight Room - epistemology of fire hazard classification *** SCDLLR NOTICE *** • This email is from an external email address. Please use caution when deciding whether to open any attachments or when clicking links. • Personally Identifiable Information (PII) should not be included in e-mail text or attachments. Do not save or transmit PII unencrypted. I doubt LH at top of gym ceiling will control rolled up mats of PU/expanded foam.. Even with over pressure. Now, if we want to design MORE EXPLICITLY by risk analyses (and consider ignition likelihood... [or just use the words "cauase and origin" to get hits when lawyers conduct expert witness searches" ]) let us go there. Consider: how many of our Electronic Equipment or Information Technology rooms with pre-action systems are in such a state of readiness that they will control their design fire? Design being: density over area Answer: maybe, maybe... 3/4 of SIPA systems in N. America (includes Mexico) which are 7-years on from commissioning, will be able to control their design fire. Essentially 25+% of owners are running without any active, automatic fire protection in these occupancies... So by previous logic applied to defend LH in school gyms, since fires are not a big problem in Information Technology rooms, (at least not a big enough problem that they are a current industry concern of note) we could then not put ANY pre-action SIPA sprinklers in Intformation Technology rooms because many of these rooms essentially don't have working sprinklers. And this has not created a problem of note. Use of risk analyses would make a LOT of our fire protection work goes away. Fire is rare. It is not because our "fancy bling-bling fire systems" (e.g. "dirty agent gas systems marketed as clean agent; SIPA, DIPA, ) are so reliable that we have tolerable fire losses. It is because Mr. Fire comes to town so seldom, in these occupancies, that we have tolerable losses.. Yes, school students should be able to evacuate a sprinklered gymnasium before untenable fire conditions develop. Risk analyses should show these students are able to evacuate safely even without a sprinkler system. And yes, ignition is extremely infrequent in schools. But these risk arguments fuel a decision for NO sprinklers, not an argument to install sprinklers using less water delivery. The PU mats in the gym (especially mats oriened vertically) represent a fire hazard well beyond LH. Is flexible foam in a gym different than flexible foam in movie theater seating? A gym can serve different purposes (tupperware bake sales); a movie theatre is less versatile. Come to think of it, if a fire developed in several movie theatre flexible foam seats (a very implausible scenario) I doubt LH would control such a fire in a theater, especially with pitched rows of seating. The radiative feedback created by the row-seating enclosure would aid fire spread. But fire is so rare there, we don't care. NFPA 13 currently focusses mostly on fire hazard. It design to the hazard. If we want to design to the likelihood, that is fine and an advancement of the art that I welcome. NFPA 13, 25 and the Building Code seldom address explicitly: fire risk analyses, likelihoods of ignition and likelihoods of RAM. They should do this more. And they should include more cost implications. It is realized keeping sprinkler costs down is a real concern to maintaining an income in fire protection. It is a conern because many owners and clients realize that Mr. Fire is an infrequent visitor. Thus they make their own risk analyses and pressure designers to value engineer the fire protection budget downwards. Risk analyses is local, because risk tolerance is local That is why when making a risk based assumption (and virtually all design decisions of consequence are risk based), the assumptions SHOULD be memorialized on the drawing, next to the design guide citations. Really important design decisions should be memorialized on metal plaques and sunk into the wall at the building entry, with stakeholders names. Unfortunately, we usually don't mention the decision rational explicitly, burying the decision trail under mounds of detail instead. Then when the fatalities happen (not in said gyms), we pay SMEs who write the safety codes to sift through the ashes of buried details. As resources become tighter, and they are at an ever accelerating rate, we must lean more and more on good judgment and local risk tolerance. Application of NFPA 13 on a hazard analyses, suggest to me, that flexible foam gymnasium wrestling (not joga) mats pose a higher sprinkler hazard than LH. If we want to couch our design using risk analyses, then declare the risk analyses logic up front on our General Notes, next to the design guide citations. That is why THIS forum is so valuable. This forum openly debates the details. And it is that process of open discussion, which helps us make better future decisions. Notes: 1. I don't make money as an expert witness in court. 2. I do design sprinkler systems from soup to nuts, but my current clients focus on saving money in areas with larger returns ( ITM on MEP utilites) than saving a little money on sprinkler capitalization costs. Scot Deal Excelsior Risk & Fire Engineering gms: +420 606 872 129 (GMT + 2)
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