Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The Fire Research Station receives and processes reports of all fires attended by the brigades, and these reports contain valuable information on the spread of fire in buildings. Previously these data have been used to obtain estimates of the chance of fire spreading beyond the room of origin, and to study the factors which influence spread at this stage. In the present report we are concerned with earlier stages of fire growth, where fire spreads from the items first ignited to the surrounding fuel, leading eventually in some fires to flashover and spread beyond the room of origin. For this purpose we use the fire reports to obtain estimates of the chance of fire spread beyond the item first ignited, which we denote by pa. The value of pa will depend not only on the physical characteristics of fires, but also on random properties of the fuel, such as spacing and size, and on chance events such as discovery by passers-by, occupants, automatic installations, etc. A statistical model is therefore desirable.