Fire Safety Guidance (old) for shopping centres

[Martin Burford]

AnthonyB
there is a publication called" Fire precautions in town centre redevelopments", published in 1972, prided at 42p, by the Home Office and the Scottish Home and Health Department. I suggest all that critise such ancient documents read it..............
Conqueror

[val]

Jokar and Conqueror

I have a habit of wandering off thread. My post was about the 'burdens on businesses' guff.
This particular shopping centre may or may not need sprinklers but plenty of care homes do...and should. Just like plenty of hotels really should fit proper detection and are being made to.
Many types of premises have been in the 'too hard to do drawer' for decades. The Fire Safety Order is forcing them to properly assess if they need to do more irrespective of how long they have operated without a fire.
The 'no burdens on businesses' accompanies every piece of government legislation and they can prove it in the rigorous financial impact assessments that are carried out!!

[AnthonyB]

AnthonyB
there is a publication called" Fire precautions in town centre redevelopments", published in 1972, prided at 42p, by the Home Office and the Scottish Home and Health Department. I suggest all that critise such ancient documents read it..............
Conqueror

Yes - Fire Precautions Guide 1, I have a scanned copy from OHSIS, very forward thinking for it's time compared to other stuff.

[kurnal]

The 1977 fire in St Johns Shopping centre in Liverpool ( built in 1968 with some sprinklers) may be of interest - I think the Fire service College still refer to the operational lessons learned. Heres a photo of the former revolving restaurant

http://www.thejudge.me.uk/Not_blog/Pictures/Gal_pg_l0021.htm

[William 29]

I don't see the point about how many persons died in shopping malls before 1972?  
How many persons died in football stadia before Bradford?  
How many died in underground railway stations before Kings Cross? Etc...........

The FRA should state that based on all current fire safety guidance the shopping mall should have sprinklers fitted and what the current risk to life is without them.  As muted above you can bet that the file from the mall is full of goodwill advice from the F&RA recommending sprinklers dating back some time?  I fully appreciate the financial implications of recommending such measures in an FRA but you can't water down universally accepted guidance and fire safety practice to suit the client....in my view.

[AnthonyB]

I would agree with the above statement - I am also stating if the client really wants to try & justify the existing spec being suitable to cope with a fire to get a fire engineering & modelling specialist to reverse engineer the existing smoke control & other systems (no documentation remains) and calculate performance against likely fire scenarios, but pointing out it's most likely to confirm our findings.

It's useful to bring in the slide rule & modeling experts on old centres from time to time - we advised it on another old centre whose unsprinklered mall  was being used for trading (good rental increase from this) as although our FRA & the fire authority frowned on this for the usual reasons the client understandably wanted to retain the usage if possible. The engineers were able to calculate that with few amendments and certain restrictions on use the systems could cope with a good safety margin and some trading now continues to the satisfaction of the FRA & fire service