The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Understanding Fire Development – Part 282

December 9, 2024 12:04 pm

Lawrence Webster Forrest (LWF) is a specialist fire engineering and fire risk management consultancy whose aim is to give information on best practice in fire safety for facilities management personnel through this blog series. In part 281, LWF discussed fire development and peoples’ understanding of it. In part 282, we continue to examine how people behave when they do not understand uncontrolled fire development in a building.

The lack of understanding of how uncontrolled fire develops inside a building can lead to people reacting in an unwise fashion. They continue their activities, remain inside to see what happens with the fire or confer with others about what to do. These reactions or variations of them have been a factor in the outcome of some of the most terrible fire disasters of modern times.

The rarity of serious fire disasters should not be taken as an indicator that this behaviour is rare. In fact, the same type of behaviour will occur in many or even most small fires too. The fire itself is more commonly controlled by the extensive fire safety measures in place in the building in question and so the lack of serious injury to occupants can be attributed to those.

The implications of the lack of appropriate decision-making in a fire situation are that a fire engineered solution for a building or campus must not rely too heavily on a correct response by occupants, or on management procedures. A system too reliant on consistent human behaviour is arguably one that is not reliable at all.

The Bradford City stadium fire in 1985 resulted in 56 people dying and more than 250 sustaining injuries. There were two significant contributory factors. The first is that the fire spread from one end of the stand, to the other in about 4 minutes. The second is that the spectators continued to watch the game of football, knowing there was a fire in the stand, initially remote from them but later working its way towards them. It was also noted that police officers were attempting to make people leave by force.

Hindsight might show us that had the football ceased the moment the fire was discovered, had there been a voice alarm system to instruct people to leave immediately, etc., that most or all of these deaths might have been avoided. As it is, the lessons learned by terrible disasters are applied to future regulations, builds and fire safety management systems to help avoid it happening again.

In part 283 of this series, LWF will continue discussing human behaviour in fire situations. In the meantime, if you have any queries about your own facilities or wish to discuss this blog series, please contact LWF on freephone 0800 410 1130.

Lawrence Webster Forrest is a fire engineering consultancy based in Surrey with over 35 years’ experience, which provides a wide range of consultancy services to professionals involved in the design, development and construction and operation of buildings.

 

While care has been taken to ensure that information contained in LWF’s publications is true and correct at the time of publication, changes in circumstances after the time of publication may impact on the accuracy of this information.