Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The fire safety design for sports grounds should include a number of considerations that are not normally required in conventional buildings. In Hong Kong, the prescriptive fire safety codes do not address large sports grounds specifically. The most relevant requirements can be found in the “Places of Public Entrainment” (PPE) section under the relevant codes and ordinances. Meanwhile, the codes in Hong Kong also allow the use of fire engineering and performance based design. As such, the use of performance based fire safety design is almost inevitable in modern sports grounds design since they do not always fall within the prescriptive code requirements. Computer modelling of crowd movements can be useful tools to form part of the fire engineering assessment. This paper attempts to conduct an extensive Hong Kong code review with regarding the fire safety of sports grounds design and management. Relevant code requirements are extracted and discussed. The use of performance-based approach is also discussed; in particular, the important elements while conducting a Qualitative Design Review (QDR) for sports grounds. A case study in Hong Kong is then presented and discussed in order to demonstrate how the fire engineering approach is adopted in parallel with the prescriptive code design in Hong Kong.