A critical study on the fire safety provisions of karaoke establishments (China)

Consequent to an arson fire occurring in a karaoke bar in Hong Kong taking the lives of 17 people, public concern on the safety aspects of karaoke establishments was raised. A unified licensing control scheme on the safety aspects of karaoke establishments has been proposed by the Government, with new regulations including a long list of fire safety requirements. However, those additional items were lack of scientific support. The karaoke industry is not convinced to follow though karaoke owners are keen on upgrading the fire safety provisions. Three points on building safety requirements are not accepted, leading to debates and arguments. The three points of concern are on: increasing the corridor width to 1.2 m; having one-hour fire resistance of internal walls and eliminating all ‘dead ends’. The objective of this project is to study the fire safety provisions in karaoke establishments critically with fire science and engineering.; Existing fire safety regulations for karaoke establishments were firstly reviewed. Fire safety aspects for existing karaoke establishments were then studied. The building nature, fire safety parameters, passive building fire protection design, fire service installations, and awareness of fire safety management in 45 karaoke establishments were surveyed in May 1998 and December 1999. An investigation was further carried out in May 2000 with detailed architectural drawings provided by 19 karaoke establishments. Special features of the karaoke establishments are identified. It is found that further studies must be carried out before recommending fire safety requirements. At the transition stage of waiting for workable proposals, fire safety management should be implemented. Proper fire safety management should give a safe karaoke establishment even if the building fire safety requirements and fire service installations are not satisfactory.; A fire safety ranking system is proposed to assess the fire safety provisions of existing karaoke establishments by investigating how far the existing karaoke establishments deviate from the new requirements.; A fundamental question on ‘how big is a karaoke fire?’ was not asked by neither the Government nor the service industry. This question should be answered by referring to the heat release rates of burning different combustible items in the karaoke establishments. Though there is no database on the fire behaviour of the local materials, estimation on the heat release rates was made in this thesis by reviewing the heat release rate curves in the literature. The likelihood of flashover due to furniture foam and other furniture items was also studied.; The zone model FASTLite was used to study the effect of changing the corridor width on the fire environment, which also leads to a good understanding of the preflashover fire. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...