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Sprinkler Stop in timber processing plant, Solihull, West Midlands

Sprinkler stop in West Midlands

http://www.nfsn.co.uk - who we are - Environmental Analysis

PESTLE Analysis:

Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental implications

Political

We should ask ourselves in this world of technological advances – “is it ethically or politically acceptable to continue to allow people to lose their life or be seriously injured from fire in the home, where they sleep, at work, being entertained or in care?”

Almost 100 years ago now legislation was introduced to prevent boys under 13 working in coal mines because it was no longer socially acceptable to expose young lives to such risks, less than 20 years before that children as young as 8 were exploited in the UK treated as human chimney brushes clearing soot from the chimneys of large country and town houses, yet 30 years earlier than that the first sprinkler system had been invented.

Therefore, in the past one hundred and fifty years of social and technological advances we have seen legislation introduced to improve the quality of life across society yet we still accept that people can be killed or seriously injured from fire in the place where they should be most secure i.e. in the home and we still see catastrophic fires in other types of buildings were there are multiple fatalities.

Is this politically acceptable when there has been the technology to mitigate this available for a hundred and fifty years? 

The network should take advantage of every opportunity to expose the political ramifications of every fire death where sprinklers would have made a difference, it should encourage press interest, directing the focus on methods of suppressing fire not only educating people of the fire dangers and home evacuation plans but informing and giving people a choice to provide better protection for their families and security of their home from fire. 

Therefore, to contemplate any new building and not include the most effective safety measures available is politically unacceptable and should leave those responsible for legislation open to criticism and possible liability in the event of loss following fatal and catastrophic fires.

Economic

Fire extracts a large cost to society each year in both financial and human terms.  In 2002 the then Home Office commissioned a report on the cost of fire.  The report was very comprehensive but still did not fully examine the additional consequential losses that are incurred as a result of fire.  Even so it was estimated that the true cost of fire annually in the UK in 2002 as being £6,900,000,000.  In the two years following this it is likely that even this basic assessment of the cost will have risen.

In financial terms the latest figures estimating the total cost of fire each year in England and Wales are Click to view file

The additional financial benefit of greatly reducing the indirect/consequential losses/costs of fire should be given more consideration.  The potential for those consequential losses are not represented in the table above should not be underestimated.

Also the table produced following the research study gives no indication of the cost benefit of sprinkler protection when it is considered holistically. The design freedoms that sprinklers provide can in many cases negate other expensive control measures providing intuitive design freedoms for the architect/building designer.

If we take into account true cost benefit, Investments on improvements to the rail infrastructure in the UK following the Ladbrook Grove rail incident have far outweighed the cost benefit of their provision.  This has been done due to the adverse public reaction about rail safety following the incident.  It implies the need to reconsider the value we place on protecting life in light of public opinion.  When it comes to loss of life in fire the NFSN should seek every opportunity to harness public opinion educating them to the benefit of fire sprinklers as a control measure to minimise the human cost of fire.

Social

Fires cost lives, those who have lost someone, been injured or had their home or work place destroyed by fire will have the event indelibly imprinted in their minds and those in the emergency services who respond to deal with fire reactively face the dangerous and difficult job of dealing with its consequences.

These human costs are very real and extremely diverse.  Many of the developments in fire safety over recent years have been to improve the safety of people from fire.  Much work has been done to better understand human behaviour of how people will react in emergency situations and to provide greater controls for their safety but those controls do not go far enough.

Human Cost of fire:

[2]Provisional figures from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) for 2003 show a sharp rise in the number of fires and fatalities according to the figures UK Fire and Rescue Services attended 619,800 fires in 2003 – 19% more than the previous year.  The number of fire related deaths in 2003 also rose to 616 Fatalities – 54 more than 2002.

The Community Fire Safety Task Force Findings (Safe as Houses 1997) Stated:

The strategic vision of the British Fire service is a society in which preventable fires; fatalities and casualties in the home are eliminated. Although a long-term vision, we nevertheless believe it is achievable.

In 1997 the CFS task force were surprised that the Home Office have had no targets on fire or casualty reduction or forecasts of future fire trends. They recommended that targets be established to reduce the incidence of accidental dwelling fires, casualties and fatalities*. The Key Performance Indicators for this approach were:

• Accidental fires:
  Reduce the number of fires in dwellings by one-third
• Accidental fire fatalities
  Reduce the number of accidental fire deaths by 40%
• Accidental serious fire casualties
  Reduce serious non-fatal casualties by 5% year on year
• Fire safety awareness, attitudes & behaviour
  Achieve a measurable annual improvement in each style="COLOR: black"> area

For each of these they offered five-year targets.

We are now almost eight years down the road from when those performance indicators were set and although there has been some reduction in the number of fire deaths and injuries it has not been one-third of fire deaths nor 40% of injuries.

Sprinklers are a key feature in reducing the number of incidences of death and injury from fire.   With the proactive use of sprinklers it is possible to exceed the expectations the Community Fire Safety Task Force had in 1997 and reduce fire deaths and injuries even further.

To achieve this we must encourage the wider community to move forward with us: the Government, local authorities, planning authorities, housing authorities, building control officers, education authorities and other community leaders must act and express their desire for communities safe from fire.

Risk to Fire Fighters

When fires occur in buildings the fire service is called.  There is an expectation that upon their arrival the service will take action to mitigate the effect of the fire regardless of the risk to fire fighters.  All too often fires are too serious for fire fighters to deal with effectively due to the nature of the fire and the exposure hazards.

Where lives are lost this becomes a tragedy.

It is hard to believe that in the 21st Century we are still designing buildings that rely on the intervention of fire fighters for the safety of building occupants and to maintain the integrity of buildings.

Technological

In the USA and Australia there is clear evidence that fire sprinklers are becoming more widely recognised as an essential element in the safety toolbox for fire risk reduction.

Technologically sprinklers are able to provide one of the most simple and effective control measures in mitigating the affect of fire, they:

1. Are heat activated and control the fire in its insipient stages, reducing the amount of heat and smoke produced, eliminating the potential for flashover.

2. Even where they are unable to control a fire fully they provide protection and additional time for people to escape.

3. Reduce the potential heat output of the fire protecting the building infrastructure inhibiting the convective and radiated heat flux from spreading the fire to other compartments.

4. Continue to suppress the fire, providing the necessary control measure to allow fire fighters to enter the building safely, ensuring a safer more tenable environment for carrying out fire fighting operations.

5. Protect the building structure and contents from the effects of fire, heat and smoke.

6. Protect the environment from exposure to the products of combustion that would be produced by a large uncontrolled fire and the large amounts of contaminated water run off from fire fighting where sprinklers were not employed.

Legal

There is sufficient evidence now to demonstrate how fire sprinklers have the ability to reduce the number of fire deaths, injuries and losses.  As a developed nation we should use the benefit of hindsight of fire where there has been significant loss, to learn how to better protect our citizens, commerce, heritage and environment from fire.

[3]It is useful to briefly mention some legal principles with respect to potential liability for fire engineers in safety design – the broad principles can be summarised and have global application.

For the design engineer the task is simple to state - in broad terms:

An engineer must bring to the design task such skill as would be expected of a competent engineer expert in the task engaged to perform.

In all jurisdictions the test is not with hindsight – it is on the basis of the state of knowledge at the time the expert’s skills were used.  As explained in an English court:

“In this world there are few things that would not have been done better if done with hindsight.  The advantage of hindsight includes the benefit of having sufficient indication of which are unimportant.  The standard to be expected of a professional man must be based on events as they occur and not in retrospect” (Duchess of Argyle v Beuselinck (1972) 2 Lloyds’s Rep 172 p185.

How can our standards in the UK, state that the risk from fire has been made as low as reasonably practicable if a means of controlling the fire size is not part of the fire engineering design or functional requirement of our Building Regulations?

Environmental

Any new development should be designed to be environmentally cleaner and more economic to maintain.

With the provision of an appropriately designed fire sprinkler/suppression system, no longer should a fire become so large and uncontrollable that even when no persons are involved, the products of combustion pollute the atmosphere, the fire fighting water run off contaminating our water courses and the material /structural damage caused calls on the use of even more non-renewable resources to repair, sprinklers provide a net gain to society.

Stakeholder Analysis

It is hard to imagine a sector of society that the provision of sprinklers could not have a positive impact upon.  The whole of society would benefit from the reduction of numbers of people losing their lives or being injured by fire or from the enhanced property/asset/ business continuity protection that sprinkler protection provides.  The following is a list of key stakeholders and an overview that the benefit of sprinkler protection could give.