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Major Building Fires - Every 45 Years?

Pivotal Howard

Registered User
Joined
Dec 15, 2022
Messages
1
Location
Canberra
CHECKING FOR COMPLIANCE. I spent most of my architectural career ‘doing the doors’ for many different architects. I would always run a scale over floor plans checking on basics like locations of stairs, hydrants, hose reels and travel distances. In recent years checking for compliance has become totally irrelevant as many certifiers and fire experts will just vary this and that.
1 A Melbourne hotel project had far greater than 60M between fire exits. They had deemed the project to comply by locating an additional fire hose reel mid-way between the two remote fire exits. It made a mockery of the fire brigade training where to escape a smoke filled multi-storey hotel fire, firemen would crawl along the floor under the smoke plume (perhaps in total darkness) following the fire hoses back to a point within 3m of the fire isolated stair door and safety.
2 A prominent Canberra institution has at the top of a huge escalator a sign that reminds fire fighters to go back to the truck and get a second hose to get to all parts of the building, as the nations treasures burn. As you move around that building there seem to be many of these signs in very obscure locations.
Since about the mid 80’s when the foxes took over the ABCB hen-house it’s became harder and harder to know what complies. Thousands of architects, builders, building inspectors, clerks of works and others once knew the codes and standards. They were all involved working together to provide safe buildings. It’s all now been out sourced to a relatively small numbers of folk in the compliance and fire engineering industry doing the bidding of those who commission their work. We all hope insurance will solve the inherant risks with yet another drive-by inspection. Give me an officious building inspector any day. The old guard in the UK with knowledge of the Isle of Man 'Summerland Fire' 1973 had all retired by the time of the 'Greffell Tower Fire' 2017. A puff of wind could have turned a few Melbourne cladding fires into multi-storey apartment disasters.
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