Fire Risk Assessment Of Building And Correlation Analysis

Cities are economical hubs and population centers of a country. The process ofurbanization is usually accompanied by the migration and concentration of ruralpopulation to cities. In this process, fire accidents related to human activities are inevitable.Rapid expansion of modern cities and emergence of new construction technologies haveprompted the construction of a large number of sophisticated high rises and large publiccomplexes. For these special buildings, the loss of lives and property could be enormousin case of fire accidents. Nevertheless, the loss can be reduced to its minimum level, aslong as stringent fire prevention measures are implemented.This study investigated four aspects of the building fire:(1) Statistical regularities of the high-rise building fire accidents. General trend of thehigh-rise building fire accidents in China from1997to2001was briefly introduced.Relatively comprehensive statistical analyses were performed on100typical high-risebuilding fire accidents between1992and2011. The analyses indicated that the high-risebuilding fire accidents in eastern China were more severe than those in central and westernChina, and more fire accidents are associated with buildings less than28stories. Carelessuse of fire, illegal welding during construction, and defects of electrical equipment andcircuits during operation are three major causes of building fire. Fire accidents frequentlyoccur in winter and spring, on Sunday and from10:00to18:00. Smoke choking and toxicgases are main reasons that lead to fatality.(2) Risk assessment approaches on building fire. The accident tree of high-risebuilding fire was at first established, which was subsequently used to determine basicelements that lead to fire and to analyze the probability of occurrence of each basicelement. In order to better associate the basic events in the accident tree with the analytichierarchy process model, the basic events were classified and converted to factors in thecriteria level of the hierarchy process analyses. Statistical analyses were then performedon one hundred historical cases of the high-rise building fire accident, so that the weight of each criteria level can be determined and the objectivity of the hierarchy analyses canbe enhanced. Therefore, this risk assessment approach can be used not only toquantitatively evaluate the impact of each element on the fire risk of buildings, but also toevaluate the risk level of the target.(3) Correlation analyses on macro factors that influence urban fire accidents. Socialand economic development level, population and meteorological conditions were selectedas relevant macro factors to carry out correlation analyses with three major indexes of fireaccidents, i.e. the incidence of fire accidents, death toll and economic losses. The mostcritical macro factor was identified and used to determine the exceedanceprobability curve of the fire accident based on the Poisson’s model. The Pearson-III typeprobability curve was established according to the statistical data of the fire occurrence, soas to verify the feasibility of using the most critical macro factor to establish theexceedance probability curve. In addition, the fire-prevention resources can be allocatedaccording to the influence coefficient of each macro factor, so that the benefit from fireprevention measures can be maximized with the least input.(4) Recommendations to prevent fire accidents of high-rise buildings. Taking intoconsideration of the tremendous potential risks to people and severe economic lossesassociated with high-rise building fire, measures to prevent building fire are proposed.This research was sponsored by The Funding of Shanghai Science and TechnologyCommittee(grant number2011-114and11dz1202000).