Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper describes a model developed for the evaluation of risks and costs from fires in office and apartment buildings. It uses both deterministic and stochastic techniques to evaluate the consequence of all possible fire scenarios that may occur in a building. The probability of each scenario occurring and the consequence of that scenario are combined, resulting in two performance parameters: the expected risk to life (ERL) and the fire cost expectation. In this paper, a brief description of the system model and the methodology used is given, as well as the results of a study showing the sensitivity of the expected risk to life to various input parameters for a three storey apartment building. The results show that fm resistance, when there are no sprinklers present, has a great impact on lowering the expected risk-to-life. When there are sprinklers present, however, its impact is insignificant. The results show that the installation of sprinkler systems is important; the ERL values are much lower for designs with sprinklers than those without sprinklers. In general, for this building, the presence of active fire protection systems is important; however, the variation of the reliability of these systems, within a reasonable range, is not critical.