Fire Safety Upgrades and Reforms

About this course.

Existing buildings sometimes need their fire safety upgraded because a building that was acceptably safe when it was built can become less safe, or fall behind what is now expected, as time passes and circumstances change. Four broad forces drive this: the physical ageing of the building's fabric and fire-safety systems; a change in how the building is used; a steady tightening of fire-safety expectations over the years; and reform programs introduced after major fire incidents reveal a risk. Often several of these act together, and the result is a gap between the protection a building actually provides and the protection people now reasonably expect.

The first force is ageing. Buildings are physical things, and both their fabric and their fire-safety systems wear out. Fire-separating walls and floors can be breached over the years by successive fit-outs and new services; seals and fire doors degrade; passive protection is disturbed and not reinstated; and active systems — detection, alarms, sprinklers, emergency lighting — reach the end of their serviceable life or become obsolete and hard to maintain. A building that was well protected on the day it opened can, decades later, have a fire-safety system that is patched, incomplete or no longer reliable. Ageing alone can therefore create a genuine need to renew and upgrade, quite apart from any change in the rules.