Bridges should be built between tower blocks and residents should be able to use lifts in the event of a fire, leading fire safety experts have said following the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Safety testing of exterior cladding will also have to be strengthened in the light of the disastrous fire, while assembly points for those evacuated from burning buildings need to be urgently revised.
Experts at a conference, held as part of the international Firex fire and security exhibition at London’s ExCel Centre, issued the series of dire warnings as they discussed the dangers posed by the rapid spread of tall buildings around the world.
Fire engineers said they fear that preparations for devastating fires similar to the one that claimed at least 79 lives last week are "woefully inadequate".
They also told the Tall Building Fire Safety Conference in London that hundreds of other tall buildings around the world are fitted with "inferior", non-fire resistant cladding, such as the type thought to have spread the flames which engulfedGrenfell Tower.
Delegates to the conference heard that the ability of firefighters to tackle such catastrophic blazes was lagging behind the growing demand for tall buildings.
Russ Timpson, founder of the Tall Buildings Fire Safety Network, said that in London alone 400 new tall buildings are under construction or planned over the next few years.
But he warned many officials with responsibility for fire safety, particularly in council run residential blocks such as Grenfell Tower, did not have the information or training required to handle an emergency.
Mr Timpson, a former firefighter and head of safety for Virgin Atlantic Airways, said: “These buildings require a high level of fire safety management and in my experience the capacity of those people is woefully inadequate.
“We are not keeping up as a fire community with the tall buildings that are being built and it’s not an issue until something dreadful happens like last week.”
He added that the ability of architects and engineers to build ever higher was outpacing the ability of firefighters to tackle potentially catastrophic blazes which took hold in tall buildings.
“There are no more tools in the box of a firefighter faced with a full height facade fire,” said Mr Timpson.
He recommended that more tall buildings should be linked by walkways, such as the one between the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, allowing occupants to escape more quickly.
Mr Timpson also urged the scrapping of emergency assembly points near tall buildings because of the danger of falling debris, as happened when chunks of burning cladding fell from Grenfell Tower onto residents and firefighters.
“An assembly point close to the building is a very bad idea as debris will fall and plane outwards in an area one and a half times the height of the buildings,” he said.
The conference also heard that steps had to be taken to redesign buildings so that lifts could be used to evacuate residents, in contrast to current advice not to use them in the event of a fire.
Many of those who managed to escape Grenfell Tower spoke of the chaos as firefighters climbed up the building while residents tried to flee down the same single smoke filled stairwell.
Peter Summer, a lift design engineer from WSP-Parsons Brinckerhoff consultants, said: “We all know with tall buildings that we have to use lifts to evacuate. The whole strategy of how we get people out of a building has to be considered at the stage of designing that building.”
Mr Summer said the time it takes to evacuate a tall building could be cut from two hours to around 30 minutes through the use of lifts, as long as they were adequately designed to withstand smoke and were contained within a fireproof core of a building.
Meanwhile, Douglas Evans, a former fire safety engineer responsible for coordinating fire protection in Las Vegas, described the Grenfell Tower blaze as “the worst exterior facade fire that’s ever occurred”.
But he warned there was a growing risk of a similar tragedy being repeated, pointing out that 70 per cent of tall buildings in Dubai alone are clad in non-fire resistant panels, including most of those built before 2012.
There have been a series of tall building fires in the region, including one at the five-star Address Hotel, in Dubai, on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Mr Evans questioned whether existing tests to measure the safety of external cladding were tough enough, since they usually failed to take into account the impact of high winds around tall buildings.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment