Amidst Escalating Fire Risks
Fire safety is a crucial concern when it comes to building regulations within the UK, especially in highly urbanised cities. Considering a number of recent fire outbreaks have involved fire protection vulnerabilities within older and high-rise buildings, little is left to the imagination about why such safety measures are needed.
Among those is Passive Fire Protection. It works as an invisible guardian that saves lives by preventing fire and smoke from spreading. However, while it is all well and good in theory, it remains a sad fact that many buildings continue to remain ‘at risk’ due to continuing delays in remediation work. Where lives and property are at risk, fire safety, especially PFP, must be addressed as quickly as possible.
Understanding Passive Fire Protection
What is passive fire protection?
Passive Fire Protection includes those fire-resistant features integrated into a building structure. These include but are not limited to, fire-resistance-rated walls, floors, doors, and ceilings installed within a building to compartmentalise fire and retard its spread, affording valuable time to the occupants for safe evacuation. Unlike active fire protection systems such as sprinklers or alarms, PFP requires no manual or automatic trigger. Instead, it operates quietly behind the scenes to contain the fire within the compartment of origin.
How PFP differs from active fire protection
While active fire protection can detect the presence of fire and extinguish it, Passive Fire Protection lays the foundational level of safety regarding barriers that delay the velocity at which fire can travel. Both systems complement each other, with active measures responding to the outbreak, while passive systems limit the fire’s ability to travel and thus provide critical time for emergency services to arrive and for residents to escape.
Escalating Fire Risks in the UK
The UK has been facing an increasing number of fire incidents, mainly in older high-rise buildings that were constructed before strict fire regulations were laid down. These tragedies have brought to the forefront the urgent need for fire protective measures in keeping with modern regulations to safeguard life and properties.
They also underline the wider issue: too many buildings are simply not designed to cope with the catastrophic consequences of a fire because fire safety improvements have been slow to come.
The cost of inaction: lives, property and long term financial impacts
When fire protection goes unnoticed, the results are often catastrophic. Delays in PFP remediation directly result in more danger to human life as fire can spread in seconds throughout a building with poorly divided fire compartments. Property damage, too, is usually heavier, and so are the insurance claims related to buildings where fire-resistant structures are not adequate.
Conclusion
Passive fire protection is something which one cannot emphasise the need enough. By giving priority to passive fire protection, these delays will reduce and hence minimise the occurrence of fire hazard, protecting life and properties for a long time.
If you need further information, you can read our comprehensive guide to cavity fire barriers here.
FAQs
Passive Fire Protection refers to fixed fire-resistant material and systems that prevent the propagation of fire and smoke. Passive fire protection plays a very significant role in the saving of lives and protection of property by containing fires at the point of origin.
Where active fire protection involves those systems that are actively responding to fire sprinklers and fire alarms, for example – PFP will entail the fire-resistant wall, door, and materials of every kind that prevent the spread of a fire.
The delay makes buildings with these deficiencies more prone to the spread of a fire and expose lives and property to greater risk.
