A u g u s t

2 0 0 3

Fire Australia 2003

Are political risks
the greatest
emerging threat to
improved fire
safety?
Environmental
Effects of Fire
Training
Flashover and
Nozzle Techniques
continued...

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF FIRE PROTECTION

ASSOCIATION AUSTRALIA AND THE
INSTITUTION OF FIRE ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA,
INCORPORATED ISSN 1032-6529
PRINT POST PUBLICATION NO. PP328567/00071

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Are political risks the

greatest emerging threat to
improved fire safety?
By Arnold Dix, Member of Counsel (Victorian Bar)
The inappropriate use of performance
based engineering techniques in fire risk
management may constitute the greatest
threat to the long-term achievement of
ongoing improvements in achieved levels
of fire life safety.
Performance based engineering is an
extremely powerful technique enabling
the creation of inherently safer and
innovative fire safety solutions than there
code based cousins. However like any tool
performance based engineering requires
expert training and use and is
susceptible to errors and even abuse.
A failure to use this powerful tool
responsibly will result in a return to
prescriptive codes to achieve uniformity in
approach despite its negative impact on
achieved levels of fire and life safety.

In Europe a series of catastrophic tunnel

fires over the last 3 years has resulted in a
Draft European Directive (May 2003)
which mandates minimum fire Life Safety
features of tunnels putting performance
based fire and life safety and risk analysis
squarely as a secondary design variation
option. This prescriptive response follows
the Political Outrage at justified but
perceived unacceptable - fire risks in many
European tunnels.
There are fundamental lessons which
should immediately be learnt from the
European Experience if we are to protect
the real safety benefits performance based
engineering brings to fire life safety.
Lessons from Europe:
Performance based engineering is
vulnerable to critical investigation
subsequent to a fire event because there
are choices made by designers which
rely on judgment and not simple code
application.
Fire and Life safety experts must not use
performance based engineering to justify
designs. i.e. Performance based
engineering must not be used as a
sophisticated tool to obscure inferior fire
life safety designs.
In order to be able to demonstrate the
basis of design and operation choices
there must be a clear articulation of:
the presumptions used for the
approved design held by
agreed person for future review

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Fire Australia August 2003

operational procedures and any

performance limitations of the as
built design.
Mandatory performance reviews where
changes of use or passage of a set
time period
Clear records kept of the design
process to facilitate subsequent safety
performance review.
Failure to comply with these requirements
will inevitably result in adverse
consequences for the fire life safety
industry (and its tools) including:
Bringing modern engineering techniques
into disrepute following a fire (and
thereby increasing the probability of
prescriptive statutory intervention)
The inability of consultants to successfully
defend legal proceedings being taken
against them (by being unable to
adequately explain their choices)
The inability of fire authorities and
regulators to successfully "explain" why
a particular fire life safety design was
approved in particular circumstances.
(Following death, injury and damage to
the structure)
That subsequent to a disaster
engineering tools will be either restricted
in their application or prohibited
There will be prescriptive responses to
disasters denying (or severely limiting)
the use of sophisticated fire engineering
tools and materials.

Accordingly it is each of our professional

responsibilities to ensure the sophisticated
tools used in fire life safety engineering are
protected by:
Proper and considered use
Regulated performance design review
Recording of the design process for
future review and explanation.

Client demands
It is sometimes difficult to resist a clients
wish to create the structure with an
inadequate budget for safety.
The temptation is to use tools honed for
optimising design such as performance
based engineering to justify designs
which are in certain circumstances unsafe.
In other words there is increased evidence
of the emergence of performance
justified engineering. Performance
justified engineering is where a decision is
made with respect to an aspect of a
design of a place and then the techniques
of performance engineering are used to
explain why this otherwise inappropriate
outcome is appropriate.
The use of performance based engineering
in this way constitutes a significant threat
to its credibility of its use as a design tool.

Common examples of client

representations
There appears to be a direct relationship
between client representations and the
consequence that a "place" will be
cheaper to build.
In relation to ventilation systems and fire
resistance of materials this is reflected in
consistent aggressive predictions about
low fire loads. Often a structure is
approved for say residential purposes
when in actual fact its use rapidly changes
into a form of manufacturing or
warehousing with no regulatory
intervention.
In such circumstances the design is no
longer appropriate indeed it may be
unsafe but without subsequent
inspection (say by a safety regulator) it will
go undetected. If a severe fire
subsequently occurs both the design and
the regulator will become the subject of
intense criticism and possibly legal
proceedings.

Regulatory risk
There is a real and ongoing risk that a
failure by the fire life safety experts to
design and build structures to appropriate
standards of safety (for both human
beings and the building fabric itself) will
result in a more prescriptive approach to
fire engineering.
This problem is highlighted by the
response of the European community
following a spate of European road tunnel
fires.
This response follows findings by
independent inquiries that some of these
catastrophic events were contributed to by
engineering complacency, failures to
change the tunnel safety systems when
the use of the tunnels changed with time,
poor procedures, and outdated
technologies.
The draft EU Directive has undergone a
number of revisions but nonetheless in its
current form it is anticipated that it will
apply to all tunnels in operation, under
design or at design stage, effectively
direct the ventilation types to be used (eg
dedicated smoke extraction in congested
urban road tunnels over a certain length),
be prescriptive about how fire safety is to
be built into tunnels and to implicitly deem
tunnels which comply with the directive as
safe.
However compliance with a code (no
matter what the intent of the code) does
not ensure that the appropriate level of
safety is achieved.
Whether it is in the construction of a new
structure, or the retrospective upgrade of
an existing structure, compliance with a
directive or other prescriptive device will
not ensure that the appropriate level of
safety has been achieved.
Life Safety performance will be judged by
Non Experts
Unfortunately in the event that there is a
catastrophe or other serious incident
within a structure it is likely that the
investigation of the incident would be
conducted by non engineers (although
often assisted by engineers). These
investigations form the admirable social
function of trying to ascertain the
causation of an incident and invariably
recommend changes which could be made
to make the world a safer place.
The difficulty for fire life safety experts is
that tools used to design buildings
inevitably recognize the inevitability of
incidents occurring and the likelihood that
when such accidents do occur people will

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be seriously injured or die and that there

may be significant damage to the building
itself.
For fire life safety experts the assessment
of risk and calculation that the most
appropriate way of delivering
infrastructure, notwithstanding that such
risks exist, is common place. Indeed it is
the ingenuity of the engineer managing
the inevitability of the demise of the
structures they design and the injury of
people that use them which underlies their
professional integrity.
The fire life safety experts are charged
with ensuring that limited resources deliver
the maximum result in terms of the
performance of the structure from both
asset preservation and safety perspectives.
However the legal profession is not often
well equipped to deal with the concepts
necessarily employed to perform this role.
On an exchange between a judge, a
barrister (advocate) whom is hostile to the
engineer, and an engineer while discussing
risk assessment methodologies highlights
both the hostility which may occur within a
legal environment in an adversarial system
and the misunderstanding of risk
assessment concepts which can occur in
any legal system where the lawyers are not
intellectually equipped to deal with the
concepts regularly employed. For
convenience I have included the dialogue
below as a transcript of what occurred.
Cross examination of engineer regarding
an event which caused deaths. (May 2003
NSW)
Barrister: You set out there what is said to be a
summary of the risk analysis provided and you
have got various categories [including] e. which is
[what] we are talking about. It says . one
accident every: 1,492 years.
Is this purporting to suggest and being treated as
serious data to be acted upon, that the risk
was a risk that would only occur one in every
1,492 years or would you dismiss that
immediately as being an [im] proper statistical
assessment.
Engineer: They are numbers to help set
priorities. I really dont understand how they come
up with the numbers.
Judge: That makes two of us [engineer].
Engineer: Sorry? [I dont understand what you
mean Judge]
Judge: That makes two of us!
Barrister: What it suggests on its face is it is
a very low level of risk. In fact, it is only a risk of,
as I understand it, of one accident occurring every

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Fire Australia August 2003

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1,492 years. Do you put that forward seriously as

being a valid statistical basis to assess the risk
Engineer: I certainly cant go through the theory
that is used to produce this set of numbers. That
report is certainly a report that has been
discussed at length in the [Court] to date and the
report that was made available to me sometime
in 1997, 1998 and those numbers were
presented to me and I acted in one way or
another on the numbers. In explaining I have no
real knowledge of, nor do I wish to try to being,
the theory which produces those sets of numbers,
other than to say they can be used to set
priorities in one form or another. If somebody told
me the risk was [one in 1,492 years] that would
mean that that incident was not going to happen
tomorrow or the next day.
Barrister: Indeed, it happened within 6 years of
1997 when that report was written; that is 6
years between 1997 and 5 February 2003.
Engineer: If an individual looks at a set of
numbers of that kind and draws a simple
conclusion that the circumstances that you are
trying to evaluate is not going to happen for
1,492 years, they clearly dont really understand
what the numbers are all about.
Barrister: A piece of absurdity, isnt it, to suggest
that statistic should be put forward and acted
upon in evaluating the risk prior to 5 February
2003 and associated with the [risk]?
Engineer: I wouldnt feel comfortable in saying it
was a piece of absurdity. There is an
international group or body of learning and
expertise and advice that uses these sets of
numbers of a daily basis on all levels of the
industry to manage risk. I could say that I simply
dont accept those numbers as being a simple
prima-facie case for saying that risk is not an
issue because you have got 1,492 years written
against it.
Judge: Is it an example, I wonder, of common
sense or intelligent application of these models
going out the window with all this sort of
nonsense? Really, I suppose a large sum of money
was expended in getting such a report; would that
be right?
Engineer: I didnt produce the report [Judge] but
safety consultants dont come cheap.
Judge: I just cannot believe this nonsense.
This exchange clearly highlights the
difficulties facing an engineer in explaining
to a third party, who is not an engineer,
the conceptual and intellectual basis upon
which they make decisions with respect to
the prioritization of risk.
This cross examination took place where
the actual risk analysis was not the subject
of intense scrutiny what was in debate
was the appropriateness of the technique

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Fire Australia August 2003

at all as a methodology of prioritizing risk.

Creation of documents

Imagine the situation if you were

defending an (in retrospect)
inappropriately low design fire size, or an
inappropriately low smoke volume
computation.

In creating documents such as technical

reports or even correspondence between
parties it should be born in mind that the
documents may subsequently be used to
determine issues which have come into
dispute.

In each of those circumstances actual

numbers could become computed so as to
draw a rational comparison between what
was presumed during the design phase
and what actually occurred. Unlike the
cross examination of risk assessment
where the issue was nonsense of
determinative probabilities of outcomes
the cross examination of material which
was factually wrong could be extremely
damaging.
Given such circumstances it is appropriate
therefore to develop strategies to assist
during the design and development and
ongoing use of structures.

Legal protection
There is a maxim that words are cheap.
Translated into law this means that there
is significant merit in ensuring that your
role and the basis for the performance of
your function in discharging that role can
be found in writing.
Although a very old fashioned idea, writing
and correspondence is an extremely
valuable tool listing determined questions
with respect to what a person understood
and did at a particular point in the past.
Accordingly where ever possible ensure:
Your role in a project is written down

This does not mean that all documents

should be created in an obscure or
aggressive fashion and whether there are
some key points which must be addressed.
These are:
1. Ensure that the language used within
the documents is consistent with a
professional fire life safety expert
discharging their obligations in a
professional fashion
2. Where reference is made to the tools
commonly used by fire life safety expert
such as the risk of an event occurring or
the likely consequences abbreviated
propositions such as option A is better
than option B because it will result in six
less deaths over a five year period must
be avoided.
This is because although the
correspondence is not intended to be read
by a non expert, if it is read by a non
expert it may be misinterpreted. In relation
to the example given above such a
proposition could be framed as our
analysis of the risk has indicated that if we
were to proceed with option A the risk of
death would be halved.
Drafting correspondence with the prospect
of non-expert reading it may initially seem
strange and almost a distraction - but
can be very useful subsequently.

Where there are issues raised with

respect to parameters you are given
(such as, design fire size etc) raise
issues regarding those parameters in
writing with the client

A failure to do this may bring modern

design tools into disrepute and cause
statutory imposition of code based design
rules.

If a client specifies that the particular

parameters have to be used in your
computation confirm this fact in writing.

Conclusions

The development of such a culture allows

each party to the delivery of a project
more easily allows each party to a major
project to determine exactly what they are
responsible for, the way in which they
discharge such a responsibility and in
identifying areas which have not properly
been resolved.
For regulators this provides documentation
which can be used for subsequent reviews
of a structures performance.

Fire Life safety experts must maintain the

primary responsibility for ensuring that
structures are constructed is constructed
safely. It is the Fire Life safety experts
professional skill in determining the use of
limited resources which underpins their role
in the delivery of safe structures.
Regulatory regimes must respond to the
demands that the passage of time (and
change in use) may have upon the safety
of structures designed using modern
techniques such as performance based
engineering.
With the passage of time changes in the

use or management practices of a

structure may render it unsafe. Regulators
must acknowledge that using performance
based engineering as a basis for design
approval also requires ongoing inspections
of these structures to ensure the
assumptions used in the development of
the safety systems are still applicable. This
requires a more sophisticated assessment
than simply "checking that fire doors are
not propped open" by a current tenant.
Modern sophisticated safety designs
demand more sophisticated regulatory
design reviews.
The fire life safety professions must be
mindful that the tools used to determine
the most appropriate way of delivering and
managing a structure may not be properly
understood by other professions such as
lawyers.
It is important that future exposure to ill
conceived criticism be managed today by
carefully composing arguments (including
words and logical sequence) to reflect the
sophisticated techniques that are used to
ensure that structures are operated at an
appropriate level of safety and that you

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have made a considered decision about

the most appropriate use of limited
resources.
Modern sophisticated fire life safety design
and analysis should be carefully
documented and stored for future review
and explanation.
Failure to abide by these simple principles
will dramatically increase the probability
that modern fire life safety design tools will
be brought into discredit in investigations
following an incident.
An adverse safety finding following an
incident has the potential to undermine
the achievements modern fire life safety
can deliver to the safety of structures.
Failure to abide by these simple perimeters
may not only lead to both private and
corporate penalty under the legal system
of your jurisdiction it may also jeopardize
the credibility of fire life safety as a
discipline which can be relied upon to
deliver safe public structures leaving
politicians with no real choice but to
impose prescriptive codes as the simplest
way of delivering public fire and life safety.

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Fire Australia August 2003