FIRE SAFETY STRATEGY
THE IMPORTANCE OF FIRE SAFETY STRATEGY AND OWNER’S MANUALS FOR BUILDINGS
Governments across Australia are pursuing building industry reforms, following events like Lacrosse and Grenfell.
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PETER JOHNSON Arup
The Lacrosse and Grenfell building fires, and the resultant regulatory reform agenda across Australia, have challenged us all in the fire safety community to do better. We are being asked the question: How might we work together to design and deliver buildings with improved quality and safety for the benefit of owners, managers, occupants and society as a whole? In simple terms, the design and construction industries need to hand over to consumers or purchasers a building of appropriate quality and adequate safety, with clearly written instructions on how to manage it through its life cycle in a cost-effective manner. The fire safety design and construction, and the tools to manage it, are what all fire safety practitioners need to deliver to consumers. This process, at least in design and construction terms, should be guided by a building manual—and a fire safety section of that manual—that is handed to the building owners at the time the occupation certificate is issued. Recommendation 20 of the Shergold Weir Building Confidence report (BCR)1
FIRE AUSTRALIA
ISSUE FOUR 2021
states that each jurisdiction should require a comprehensive building manual for Class 2–9 buildings to be lodged with the building owners and be made available to successive purchasers of the buildings. The Australian Building Codes Board, as part of its response to the BCR, developed a consultation paper entitled Discussion Paper: Building Manuals— A Response to the Building Confidence Report 2021.2
Manual requirements
Consistent with this general national policy, the NSW Government, through the Office of the Building Commissioner and the Department of Customer Service, has started setting out in detail what aspects of a fire safety manual should be included in a comprehensive building manual. This is a task being led by FPA Australia President Bill Lea. Of necessity, the development of a suitable manual requires the input of fire safety design practitioners. In broad terms, such a fire safety manual needs to have two key components: a section for building owners, managers and tenants or occupiers, written in plain English, that sets out the things they need to know to manage and maintain the building
effectively and occupy it through its lifetime a more detailed technical section which provides ‘as built’ drawings, technical specifications, design and construction details, and other information that will enable contractors, designers and others to maintain the building and all its services, including its fire protection systems, on an ongoing basis. For the first section, there needs to be a fire safety schedule to set out: the fire safety systems, active and passive, and how they need to be maintained the standards, such as AS 1851, which detail the frequency of inspections and testing. For example, owners and tenants in a residential building need to understand that they cannot hire a plumber or electrician to come in and punch a hole through a fire-rated wall for a cable or pipe without restoring the fire resistance rating of the wall as part of the work. And building managers should know whether they need to keep a foyer or base of an atrium sterile (or free of combustibles), if that is part of a performance-based fire safety design for a building.
