Fire Safety

Fire and CO safety in residential tower buildings is never out of the spotlight for long. It’s crucial to be in the know when it comes to the most effective CO, smoke and heat alarms, as well as best practice when it comes to siting them. Adrian Keats from Honeywell’s Home Safety business explains.

Following the tragic events at Grenfell Tower, the subsequent Hackitt Review into Building Regulations and the ongoing Public Inquiry, Colt are proud to establish their viewpoint on Compliance and Competence.
The word compliance appears in the Hackitt Review Final Report 46 times and competence appears 152 times - these are clearly important terms for the fire safety industry, yet a recent conference on competence from the Construction Industry Council (CIC) working groups representing specific sections of the construction industry struggled to provide a clear single interpretation of what competence really means.

Coadjute, a platform for decentralised workflow and data sharing within the property industry, and several UK housing associations have completed a prototype of Quality Chain, a workflow application aimed at making the construction of housing simpler and safer.

The Coadjute platform uses R3’s Corda distributed ledger technology and designed to unify organisations involved in the development of housing projects from inception through to construction and occupation, Quality Chain captures and tracks a single version of key decisions, documentation and information.  It creates the ‘golden thread’ of accountability and transparency identified as necessary by the Hackitt Report.

The new Building (Amendment) Regulations in December 2018 require stricter fire safety compliance for new, refurbished and converted residential buildings with a floor above 18 metres from the ground. Architects and developers have been adjusting to those changes, but the recent Barking balcony fires have prompted a new government publication, Advice Note on Balconies in Residential Buildings, which will have a wider impact. It applies to all existing residential buildings with multiple dwellings, irrespective of their height.

Compartmentation is a way to keep a fire contained in one place, preventing fire and smoke from spreading quickly and taking over the building. By creating these fire-resistant compartments, fire can be suppressed for around 30 minutes (time can vary depending on the building structure).

There are different elements to creating a fire safe compartment and there are many things that can reduce the effectiveness.

Hyde has recently launched an innovative fire safety framework which ensures that resident fire safety is at the heart of fire safety measures undertaken by Hyde and other users. Its ethos is accountability, competence and traceability, reflecting terms that have appeared throughout the ‘Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety: Final Report’ by Dame Judith Hackitt  and Government publication: ‘Building A Safer Future: An Implementation Plan.’

Jason Leech assesses the implications of an important new guidance document, deriving in part from the Grenfell disaster, and having far-reaching implications on the selection of spandrel panels for high-rise buildings.