9 minute read
Meet the Speaker: Christina Knorr
Christina Knorr talks about compliance versus safety within the Australian context, and the need to keep fire engineers involved in building projects from design, to construction, and beyond.
Christina Knorr is a Special Expert in Fire Safety Engineering and a practicing fire safety engineer with accreditations and presence Australiawide. She is the managing director and founder of CJK Fire & Safety Pty Ltd, a fire engineering consultancy based in Far North Queensland, Australia.
At the Fire NZ Conference, Christina will be speaking on the topic of “Does Compliance Always Mean Safety?”.
Having commenced her career a decade ago, Christina provides consulting engineering and Expert Witness services, assisting Courts across Australia and internationally. Passionate about passing on knowledge, Christina established, CJK Fire & Safety Education, an education platform offering online courses, blogs and podcasts for the wider construction industry, property, and legal professionals.
Christina holds a First-Class Honours degree in Mechanical Engineering from Victoria University, Melbourne (2012) and a Masters of Fire Safety Engineering from The University of Western Sydney (2017). Last year, Christina won the prestigious HIA Building Women Awards 2022 ‘Professional Services Excellence’ award. She sits on various committees, contributes as a guest lecturer at the Central Queensland University and is seen as someone who “always can find a solution”.
FNZM: Can you briefly describe your journey into fire safety engineering?
CK: I came with my partner as a backpacker to Melbourne and eventually we fell in love with the country and decided to stay. I enrolled in Victoria University to do my Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering, and on graduation I found a position in Sydney at a small consultancy doing mechanical engineering, fire safety protection and project management.
By the time I was interviewed and started the position, the mechanical engineer had left the company. But instead of letting me go, the manager assigned me to assist the company’s fire safety engineer. This is when I first learned about fire safety and then about 18 months into my job, I decided to pursue it further and I found a job in a fire safety engineering consultancy in Sydney.
Interestingly, the Victoria University offered a Masters in Fire Safety, but at that time nobody was talking about it and hence I did not know about this unique profession until I fell into it. So, when I started the new role, I commenced the Masters course at Western Sydney University –working full time and studying on the side.
FNZM: Does compliance always mean safety? What’s your presentation topic about?
CK: Coming from Australia I will talk about the Australian system and what compliance with the building code means and draw comparisons to New Zealand. I will outline where just following the compliance path can lead to safety issues or issues that remain undetected for long periods of time.
It’s about ensuring that we design safe buildings and not just compliant ones. Although compliance is the minimum acceptable level, in most cases, we can do more to deliver a safer building rather than just ticking boxes.
FNZM: Is there a compliance mentality that pervades the design and construction of new buildings?
CK: Yes, because people are money conscious, and the idea is to get all the ticks you need to have while not spending more money than necessary. When we become registered engineers, we sign a code of conduct stating that we will act in the best interests of the general public and, in my view, safety is exactly that – you act in the interest of the building user and potentially the designer and builder and developer so that they don’t end up in trouble and fighting their case in court, which can cost them more money than they had originally saved. There is also the principle of functional safety in design which we have to comply with, as well as health and safety regulations, so if something is compliant but not considered to be functionally safe for a person to use, then we are not technically complying.
FNZM: In your experience, are there any particular areas in particular that tend to be underdone or overlooked?
CK: In Australia, a fire engineer writes a report, submits it, and it’s done. We don’t go on site and check, and we are not involved in the construction process. Any poor workmanship is hidden behind the lining. If the building certifier asks us to do final sign off at the end of the project, there’s only so much we can see.
Engineers are not involved throughout the project, therefore they don’t get a chance to pick up on potential issues, and are not kept on long enough throughout the project – the engagement of the fire engineer is often an after-thought. In Australia, the fire engineer only gets a list of issues where a potential non-compliance with the prescriptive provision has been identified by the building consultant/certifier. The fire engineer is engaged to look only at those potential non-compliances, thus missing out on a broader understanding of the building.
Whatever the building size, it is the case in Australia that it’s the architect who puts measures in place to tick compliance, and if everything complies with the provisions there’s no requirement for a qualified fire engineer to oversee the process.
FNZM: Where would be the ideal time for you to come into a project?
CK: The ideal time is at the very beginning, when the architect sits down and discusses what the broader idea is at concept design stage because we can tell them very early on that certain design choices are hard or impossible or won’t be supported. This will allow them to make those design changes very early in the project and not have to redraw and redraft everything once the concept is ready.
The fire engineer ordinarily prepares a couple of reports. One is a fire safety strategy where we provide a high-level outline of the strategy, and the other is a performance-based design brief which is sent out to the stakeholders. In that brief we outline non-compliances, acceptance criteria, and how we intend to demonstrate that performance requirements are met.
This report is sent to the stakeholders, including the fire brigade, architect and developer for comment, and once it’s all done, we do the actual fire engineering assessment report where we expand on the second report. Often it stops there, and it’s all done before the building obtains a construction certificate (permit for construction).
The problem within this is that any design changes that happen afterwards may not be picked up, and ten years down the track the building owners may get a notice from the council or fire brigade to identify structures that have been built but are not compliant and don’t align with the fire engineering report.
As I understand it, in New Zealand the fire engineer is kept throughout the process, and they are also attending site during construction and signing off on certain aspects of the build, and they carry liability when it comes to building construction. I think we can learn lots of lessons from New Zealand because once there is liability placed on an individual, they tend to place more attention to detail and are motivated to raise issues even if outside their area of expertise.
FNZM: What are your thoughts on the ongoing involvement of the fire engineer post assessment?
CK: Too often we find buildings that are subject to a fire engineering assessment, but nobody can find where the fire engineering report is, and some contractor ticks it off every year despite not having a copy of the report.
New South Wales, for example, has become better in this regard. The State now requires a competent practitioner to check certain measures in a building – and a fire safety engineer is deemed to be a competent practitioner. Ideally, you’d have a fire engineer on site every year to confirm that the design as documented in the fire engineering report is still the same and that no changes have occurred.
In Queensland, such measures don’t exist. There’s no requirement for the fire engineering report to be in a particular format or to be kept in a particular location on site. In most cases they’re lost – and the fire engineer isn’t going back to check. So, as a fire engineer, I recommend to the client that document boxes be installed and locked so that the chances of the report being lost are minimised.
As an example, one project we’re trying to rectify is a commercial building which was subject to a fire engineering report that was from back in the days when the report was only issued as a draft and never finalised or officially approved. It is listed on the schedule in terms of fire safety measures, and every year, it gets ticked off as part of annual certification despite having never being sighted.
Once we sourced a copy of the report, we were able to identify that the building isn’t built as documented in the report – there’s a staircase missing, some doors missing – whatever the fire engineer designed has not been implemented and the fire engineer had not been brought back to raise it. And now it’s really hard to retrofit those measures, they’re expensive, and sometimes we’re really stuck in terms of what to do.
FNZM: Is there any way of resolving this or is it an issue that will continue to be faced?
CK: I think the motivator is money and education. All around the world there is a huge lack of education. People buy houses and apartments and there’s no set of instructions on what to do in a fire event; what fire safety provisions they’ve got, where the fire stairs are, whether you’re supposed to open or close the apartment doors, and things like that. Unless we manage to raise awareness, it will be really difficult to change.
In Australia, we get a lot of legislative changes, sticks flying around, finger pointing, more fines, and more restrictions on the builders, consultants, and developers. The result of this is that we have less and less professionals who want to stay in that industry and continue building. The housing crisis is not going to be resolved by punishing the builders but rather by educating them.
I speak at seminars and sometimes I’m really surprised by just how little people know – people such as architects and builders – I explain to them what compliance means, what different Building Code Clauses mean and about research they should conduct when reviewing product documentation. We need to get better with providing quality education and quality assurance.
