Deliberately lit fires make up over 15% of all fires in New Zealand buildings yet they are
typically omitted from the design brief for fire engineering purposes. This report examines
where deliberately lit fires should be included as part of the fire engineering design by
examination of all deliberately lit fires recorded in the New Zealand Fire Incident
Reporting System (NZ FIRS) between the years 1996 and 2006.
The main types of buildings identified where consideration of deliberately lit fires within
the design would provide benefits are:
· Prisons
· Psychiatric institutions
· Schools
· Crowd activities
· Attached accommodation
The report also examined what is required to include deliberately lit fires as part of the
design process. Based on an analysis of the fire incident statistics, the majority of
deliberately lit fires are the result of unplanned activities and existing design fires will be
adequate. Two critical fire scenarios were identified as exceeding these requirements, the
ignition of multiple fires and the use of accelerants. Greater life safety benefits are obtained
by considering accelerants.
In the case of multiple fires, each fire is likely to be within the capabilities of a fire
engineered building however a number of such fires may overwhelm the fire protection
features of a building. A number of issues for the fire engineer to consider are briefly
discussed. In the case of accelerants, a number of experiments were completed to
characterise the heat release rate and species production of a Molotov cocktail based on the
fuel volume used. A second round of experiments extended this work by examining the
scenario where a Molotov cocktail containing 1000 milliliters of petrol was deployed
within a stairwell.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/1779 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Richards, Paul Leonard Edward |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Civil Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Paul Leonard Edward Richards, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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