Floor fire resistance

[lyledunn]

Conversion of an old office building to hotel use requires the floors to have 90min fire resistance as the building height is just over the magical 18m by about 2.5m. No sprinklers. Now the fire engineer has proposed 90min protection for the ground and top floors leaving the intermediate bedroom floors at 60min. The bedroom floors have been fitted with 60min ceilings in error. The key mitigation on offer is the introduction of a third fire escape stair. Am I not right in saying that the primary purpose of increasing fire resistance with increasing building height is to ensure structural stability to permit search and rescue?

[Revol]

So a 90 min building sat on top on a 60 min building ? what could possibly go wrong!?

Interestingly I believe New Street station had a similar issue during the recent refurbishment when it was discovered that the cover to the re-bar within the floors were inadequate to current standards.

[Fishy]

Yep - number of stairs is irrelevant, in my view.  Please don't tell me that they've written anywhere that "...everybody will be out of the building within 60 minutes anyway... which is the usual lame reasoning that I've seen before!?

[colin todd]

Fish face, are you really suggesting that a 60 minute door is not still totally undamaged at 59 mins 59.999999999999999999999999999999 seconds, while, at 60 mins. plus 00000000000000001 seconds there is a sodding great hole where the door used to be.

This is a ridiculous suggestion on your part, and can be totally refuted by every armchair expert in the land plus the 7,787,770,970,987,097 fast streamer civil servants at the MHCLG, who must know what they are talking about because, for the last 3 years, they have been working on income tax policy.

Now, please wash your mouth out with soap, while singing happy birthday (twice).

[bevfs]

Conversion of an old office building to hotel use requires the floors to have 90min fire resistance as the building height is just over the magical 18m by about 2.5m. No sprinklers. Now the fire engineer has proposed 90min protection for the ground and top floors leaving the intermediate bedroom floors at 60min. The bedroom floors have been fitted with 60min ceilings in error. The key mitigation on offer is the introduction of a third fire escape stair. Am I not right in saying that the primary purpose of increasing fire resistance with increasing building height is to ensure structural stability to permit search and rescue?

hi lyledunn, i'm interested to know what was the outcome to this issue?,was the proposed  extra escape stair accepted?

[lyledunn]

Bevfs, no resolution as yet. The site is closed following the financial demise of the developers. However, the last talk was to retrofit a sprinkler system.