Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Client demands
It is sometimes difficult to resist a clients
wish to create the structure with an
inadequate budget for safety.
The temptation is to use tools honed for
optimising design such as performance
based engineering to justify designs
which are in certain circumstances unsafe.
In other words there is increased evidence
of the emergence of performance
justified engineering. Performance
justified engineering is where a decision is
made with respect to an aspect of a
design of a place and then the techniques
of performance engineering are used to
explain why this otherwise inappropriate
outcome is appropriate.
The use of performance based engineering
in this way constitutes a significant threat
to its credibility of its use as a design tool.
Regulatory risk
There is a real and ongoing risk that a
failure by the fire life safety experts to
design and build structures to appropriate
standards of safety (for both human
beings and the building fabric itself) will
result in a more prescriptive approach to
fire engineering.
This problem is highlighted by the
response of the European community
following a spate of European road tunnel
fires.
This response follows findings by
independent inquiries that some of these
catastrophic events were contributed to by
engineering complacency, failures to
change the tunnel safety systems when
the use of the tunnels changed with time,
poor procedures, and outdated
technologies.
The draft EU Directive has undergone a
number of revisions but nonetheless in its
current form it is anticipated that it will
apply to all tunnels in operation, under
design or at design stage, effectively
direct the ventilation types to be used (eg
dedicated smoke extraction in congested
urban road tunnels over a certain length),
be prescriptive about how fire safety is to
be built into tunnels and to implicitly deem
tunnels which comply with the directive as
safe.
However compliance with a code (no
matter what the intent of the code) does
not ensure that the appropriate level of
safety is achieved.
Whether it is in the construction of a new
structure, or the retrospective upgrade of
an existing structure, compliance with a
directive or other prescriptive device will
not ensure that the appropriate level of
safety has been achieved.
Life Safety performance will be judged by
Non Experts
Unfortunately in the event that there is a
catastrophe or other serious incident
within a structure it is likely that the
investigation of the incident would be
conducted by non engineers (although
often assisted by engineers). These
investigations form the admirable social
function of trying to ascertain the
causation of an incident and invariably
recommend changes which could be made
to make the world a safer place.
The difficulty for fire life safety experts is
that tools used to design buildings
inevitably recognize the inevitability of
incidents occurring and the likelihood that
when such accidents do occur people will
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Creation of documents
Legal protection
There is a maxim that words are cheap.
Translated into law this means that there
is significant merit in ensuring that your
role and the basis for the performance of
your function in discharging that role can
be found in writing.
Although a very old fashioned idea, writing
and correspondence is an extremely
valuable tool listing determined questions
with respect to what a person understood
and did at a particular point in the past.
Accordingly where ever possible ensure:
Your role in a project is written down
Conclusions
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