Engineers welcome review of fire regulations

Engineering New Zealand Te Ao Rangahau and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers NZ welcome Government commitment to looking at building regulations that apply to higher-density housing following the Loafers Lodge fire.

“My heart goes out to people who’ve lost loved ones or have to rebuild their lives after this tragedy,” said Chief Executive Richard Templer.

“What isn’t clear is what went wrong and whether regulations for high-density buildings need to be tightened. As such, we welcome the Government’s commitment yesterday to reviewing these regulations and will contribute our engineering expertise where we can.”

Carol Caldwell, President of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers NZ agreed. “From what we know, potential safeguards that may have helped protect the lives of residents weren’t in place, but weren’t necessarily required to be.,” she said.

“It is obvious that the fire design and the associated fire safety management and system maintenance did not work as intended for this building. There needs to be a robust investigation to help identify if any changes are needed to regulations.”

She said that although there have been minor amendments to regulatory documents for fire engineering, the verification methods and acceptable solutions that provide detailed design guidance haven’t been comprehensively reviewed since 2012.

“I think the idea this kind of tragedy can happen in New Zealand doesn’t sit with most people,” said Caldwell. “I think it shows the strong case as to why a review of fire engineering legislation is urgently needed.”

FENZ and NZPFU discuss risk reduction

According to the Ian Wright of the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU), following the Loafers lodge fire, “it has been established that one of the challenges facing our Risk Reduction Teams is the ability to identify high-risk buildings that are providing transient accommodation within our communities.”

“These buildings are becoming more common and often they are noncompliant with the evacuation regulations, and have no approved evacuation scheme in place,” he said. “In a number of cases, these buildings are only being found after front line crews had been responded to incidents within them.

“This has been identified as a risk, not only to the safety of the people living in these buildings, but also to the safety of the firefighters attending incidents in them, and putting themselves in positions of danger whilst attempting to account for all of the occupants.”

According to Wright, discussions have been held between the NZPFU National Committee and FENZ representatives around a plan to get frontline crews to collect and share information with district risk reduction teams, when responding to high risk transient accommodation buildings that either don’t have an approved evacuation scheme, or their evacuation scheme is not performing as it should.