Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

For some purposes, such as fire protection legislation and fire insurance, it is desirable to have some measure of the inherent fire hazard of industries. Experience and knowledge of the materials and processes involved have led to the adoption of fire precautions of various kinds in most industries; but despite this there, remains some degree of fire hazard which may be more pronounced in one industry than another and which is reflected both in fire frequency and in fire spread. This study has been made in terms of fire frequency only since there is at present no satisfactory quantitative measure of fire spread available to the Organization. As the ultimate objective of fire prevention would be the total elimination of fires in industry it is not possible to define any specific level of fire frequency as being "acceptable", and the effort has therefore been directed towards deriving a method of comparing one industry with another.