هزینه های اقتصادی آتش سوزی: بررسی داده های حادثه آتش سوزی انگلستان به منظور توسعه یک ابزار طراحی

Statistical analysis of previous fire incidents in the UK has been carried out with the intent of providing an evidence base in the creation of a decision support system tool for UK fire engineering consultants to aid in the design of cost effective fire engineered structures. Analysis of the fire incident data has shown that the data collected until 2008 in the UK is very binary in nature and this has made it difficult to create an accurately predicting damage model. Even though statistical modelling of the data proved to be inaccurate, cost comparisons of other data sets (loss adjustors costs and UK building costs) was carried out and discussed, allowing the cost of fires to be calculated using over time should the data provided by the new Fire and Rescue Service data collection methods allow for collection of data in a non binary form.

Fires in buildings have occurred for many years leading to disastrous effects. The UK Government and building regulators have tried for years to prevent fire deaths through the implementation of building regulations such as Approved Document B (ADB) and pro-active fire safety initiatives, such as the “Fire Kills” campaign, run by the Department for Communities and Local Government [1]. These efforts have had a measurable amount of success, certainly in UK where fire deaths have fallen over the period from 1998 to 2008 [2] and shown in Fig. 1.This decline in fire deaths is an achievement. However, whilst fire deaths have declined, over the same period of time, fire costs have slowly been rising [4] and this has caused concern amongst the insurance industry and others in the Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) industry. Though the costs of fire are relatively small in comparison to the GDP of a country – in 2008, the cost of fire to the UK economy was £8.3 billion [2] compared to it's GDP of £1446 billion [5] (less than 1 percent of the UK GDP), it is still a cost that can be potentially be reduced through the use of fire engineering and prevention of fire. Cost reductions are believed to come through the addition of extra protection in buildings and the use of fire engineering. The move from prescriptive building codes and therefore over engineered buildings has allowed the use of fire engineering to offer a more cost effective method of building design. In fact, Torero states: “Fundamentally, cost reduction is the only value we have to make our engineering better. If we don't embrace the idea of cost reduction, then what are doing? Lets just go back to prescription and over prescribe everything and ignore the whole thing.” [6] This quote implies that fire engineering still needs to embrace cost reductions to improve its offering to the wider building community. Fire engineering offers a number of benefits to that of meeting the Building Regulations [7] by following the guidance in Approved Document B [8]. Approved Document B is designed to produce safe buildings for the occupants, with a minimum amount of work. However, the solutions contained within can be restrictive to architects and other building services. Fire engineering offers the benefits of increases in travel distances, removal of staircases and other aspects that allow architects and building owners to maximise the use of the available space and therefore either save money in terms of construction costs or to gain more money in terms of usable (and therefore rent/sell-able) area. This work intends to create a design tool methodology that will enable fire engineers to consider the cost reductions they can design into the building from the design stage, through the use of statistical analysis of previous fire incidents. Buildings built to Approved Document B do not offer much in regards to cost savings, though by following the guidance of British Standard 9999 [9] or 7974 [10]. This work only covers non residential buildings within the UK as these were considered to be the properties at risk of greater monetary loss and properties likely to undergo fire engineering work. It should be noted that residential properties can also have fire engineering, non prescriptive solutions, however this was not covered in this research.

In conclusion, this research has investigated the possibility of using the UK FRS data collected in FDR 1 forms to try and construct a predictive model that would allow the size of a fire, considering aspects of a proposed building design, to be calculated and then used in a cost analysis, allowing fire safety engineers to construct more cost effective buildings that protect both life and property. It has been shown that the data collected by the FDR 1 forms are very binary in nature and unfortunately this data makes it difficult to accurately predict the size of a fire and does not allow for the freedom of statistical analysis that collecting continuous data would enable. This is the largest database of its type in UK and its statistical use for predictive modelling appears to be strictly limited, and hence the ability to create a predictive model is not possible using the data available. However, should better data become available, the cost calculations have been shown and discussed on how these would be applied. Calculations from data collected at the design stage of the building has been statistically compared to costs of fires collected after a building has suffered a fire and this analysis has shown that both values are not statistically significant therefore suggesting that loss adjustor's cost estimates are similar to the original cost of the building construction. This allows the use of building costs to accurately reflect the costs of fires to the UK economy.