Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The paper summarizes the background, method and some findings of an on-going study in fire risk assessment for non-residential buildings in Japan. The proposed method bases itself on two sources of information: fire statistics and building inventory statistics. Fire incident records are utilized for obtaining the empirical risk vs. probability of exceedance for a group of buildings of interest, while the probability of fire is specified taking into account the effect of building size, which is represented by alternative indices other than the most straightforward measure, the floor area, because of the lack of relevant construction statistics.