29/3/2016
The construction phase, refurbishment and technical work are critical situations in terms of fire risk: melting operations, cutting, roof water-tightness, etc. In addition, all these operations may require disconnection of active systems, such as extinction, detection and alarm (if such systems are already installed). Moreover, a lot of construction product waste and packaging that have no fire resistance may remain, drastically increasing the fire load.
The recent fires in ‘la Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie’ and in the Ritz Hotel – only a few days before it was due to reopen – have had dramatic consequences, with large financial losses from structural, heritage and operating damage. These losses may exceed 100 million euros per claim.
Efectis is your ideal partner to give advice to the owner and the builder on how to control each stage of the fire risk:
- Efectis has many tools to control and mitigate the risk, which the designer and the builder could take into consideration beforehand: models for identifying the consequences of a fire during the different construction phases, testing of materials (reaction to fire and fire resistance), reduction of the fire load, official assessment for implementation of temporary compartmentalisation, passive protection or evaluating temporary active measures, producing rules and procedures, proposing specific schedules, special portable fire extinguishing systems, etc.
- After a fire, Efectis can give advice to legal/court experts and insurers: fire investigation, identification of fire causes, fire scene reconstruction, identification and validation of expert assumptions. Efectis recently published a book on fire investigation. As some fires affect only a limited area, Efectis is able to establish the consequences of the fire, thereby determining the minimum requirements for continuing to operate the building and reduce the business interruption time, so as to keep down the financial losses.
Example of damage to a large fire partition wall. The post-fire assessment was able to derfine rules for reopening the area, and the temperatures reached by the fire, confirmed by fire modelling
Contact: Eric Guillaume – eric.guillaume@efectis.com