7 minute read
Meet the Speaker: Rob Holland
Rob Holland discusses ‘safety in design’, the workplace health and safety implications of fire safety, and the idea of ‘acceptable solution’ as a social contract that’s linked to the value of human life.
Rob Holland is a Chartered Professional Fire Engineer and Director of Nelligan Consulting Engineers, a consultancy firm based on Auckland’s North Shore. He has worked in the fire safety industry for the last 16 years across a wide range of residential, commercial, and industrial projects.
At the Fire NZ Conference, Rob will be speaking on the topic of “Your compliant design is probably not safe enough: The Safety in Design philosophy, what it is and why you should (and must) include it in your design process.”
Rob is also the co-Chair and Treasurer of the New Zealand Society of Safety Engineering (an Engineering NZ Technical Interest Group) a group dedicated to promoting “safety in design” principles across all engineering disciplines and facilitating the sharing of ideas between these disciplines as well as between engineers and other stakeholders.
FNZM: What was your path to fire engineering?
RH: After gaining a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from The University of Auckland in the 1990s, I started off in hydraulic fluid power. A few years later I joined my current employer, we heavily specialise in the insurance field – mechanical failures, floods, fires.
It was through the 2000s that my senior partner was doing a lot of work in fire, and he completed his masters.
I was helping him with his fire reports and fire investigations reports, and that’s when my interest was piqued. In 2012, I launched myself into the masters course. It was a tough four years, and I’m lucky I did it just before having kids!
FNZM: What is your understanding of ‘safety in design’ and what’s that philosophy is all about?
RH: “Modify pixels, don’t modify the building” – I like how this sums up why safety in design is so important because it makes safety so much cheaper and simpler and more effective in the long term. If you think about safety only after you’ve finished the building the solution you come up with is not going to be as effective or robust.
An example of this is when air conditioning units are placed on the roof because the design didn’t leave space for them on the ground. It’s then after the fact that you realise that you have to get up on the roof to service them and so rope access methods or walkways with hand rails are needed, whereas if a space had been designed for the units on the ground from Day One that risk would have been eliminated.
I think all designers in the fire industry – fire protection as well as fire engineering – have become a bit complacent, by only designing to the bare minimum standard, but that’s mainly cost and client driven. We design to the bare minimum for the cheapest cost to the client for our own commercial interest – if we start demanding too much and charge too much for our fire reports, we lose jobs.
I’ve joked that I want to start a revolution, because that’s what I’m really aiming for, a philosophy shift, a culture shift around the idea that we shouldn’t be designing to that minimum anymore. A fire engineer should be doing more than what the minimum requirements are in the Code; we should be reminding ourselves what it means to be a good engineer.
FNZM: How do you reconcile being a good engineer with delivering a solution that ticks the compliance and client boxes but doesn’t achieve everything that a safety in design approach might achieve?
RH: I think it comes down to collaboration and communication, which is one of the key messages of the Health and Safety at Work Act. Think about a typical building design, it’s very compartmentalised; you’ve got fire engineers, architects, and structural engineers not talking to each other that much, and then there are the people who are actually going to occupy and use the buildings – and you’re not even talking to them at all.
It’s about leading with the moral argument, sitting down with the client and saying, for example, “you can achieve the minimum but for not much more money we could change the type of GIB so that instead of it being a non-fire rated wall it’s now a fire rated wall.”
That’s our job. We’re the one person in the project that has the thorough understanding of fire risks, what it means if we don’t put a fire wall here, what it means if there isn’t smoke detection there, whereas Joe Public just tends to see extra dollar signs. It’s about being a good engineer in the full sense of the term.
The second part of it is the legal argument, because the Health and Safety at Work Act clearly says that there is a duty to remove all risks so far as reasonably practicable, and I think there’s a good proportion of fire engineers who either don’t know about their obligations under the Act or choose to ignore them.
FNZM: You’ve mentioned a moral obligation and a legal one. Is there a financial element as well?
RH: There’s a potential long term financial gain to safety in design by fewer accidents and incidents and the prevention of reputational fallout, but people tend not to think into the long term. It is part of our jobs as the experts to make sure that clients are aware of this.
I’m the optimist, I guess. I believe that the vast majority of reasonable clients – once they’re given all the information on a safety in design approach – would agree with it, but it requires the answering of some confronting questions: It’s going to cost so much more financially now, but what’s a human life worth? What is the saving represented by preventing one person dying, and does that represent additional money well spent?
There was a huge amount of coverage in the media around why Loafers Lodge wasn’t sprinklered, and the reality is that according to the ‘Acceptable Solution’ (and therefore the Building Code) that building would need to be at least eight stories high to require sprinklers. It was only four stories high, yet there was huge uproar in the media to the effect that it should have been sprinklered.
I suggest that the Acceptable Solution represents a type of social contract or agreement in relation to how much money should be spent on a building’s safety systems to achieve a certain level of safety.
Hypothetically, as a society we might agree that sprinklers are not required in any building and we could build that into the Building Code, and as a result we might get 30 additional deaths a year from apartment building fires. As a society, we might agree that that’s okay. It’s a social contract about what’s acceptable.
In the case of Loafers Lodge, someone was quoted in the media as saying, “I just can’t believe it was acceptable that this building wasn’t sprinklered”, or words to that effect. This suggests that the Acceptable Solution may have failed because it has failed to meet the expectations of it as a social contract. These are uncomfortable yet important conversations.
