Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A recent development in the industrial field is the introduction of highstacked storages of heights ranging from 6 m (20 ft) up to as much as 30 m (100 ft) or more. These storages create a high fire hazard both in their configuration and and in the immense value of the goods in them. The detection and extinction of fires in them is of paramount importance. This note describes an investigation of the efficacy of a conventional sprinkler system, combined with the latest means of fire detection in controlling fires developing in a palletised storage of height 7.3 m (24 ft), consisting of two rows of back-to-back pallets at four levels. The main avenues of fire spread were found to be up the vertical gaps between the goods, rather than up the outer face of the stack, and it was found that sprinklers installed on the longitudinal axis of the rack to cover each gap at alternate levels controlled the fires, without the fires ever reaching serious proportions. It was also found that the detection systems gave a warning of fire from 3 to 7 min before the first sprinkler operated.