Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The statistics of fires attended by the fire brigades are used to examine the effect of, different standards of fire cover and attendance time on the chance of a fire spreading beyond the room of its origin. The analysis has been performed for several different occupancies and reveals no significant trend for fires to spread in multi-storey buildings as the attendance time gets longer. As a result of comparing different risks it appears that in most occupan- cies, the system of varying standards of cover compensates for different risks of spread, so that high risks have the same chance of confinement as low risks. However, there are one or two exceptions notably in the Manufacturing Industries, where some classes of building have a much higher chance than average of fires spreading beyond the room of origin, and data for these buildings require further examination.