Bridging the gulf
January 2016

The dramatic images of the catastrophic fire to The Address luxury hotel in Dubai on New Year’s Eve were deeply shocking. While sadly several people were hurt, that no one was killed seems extremely fortuitous considering the scale of the fire. Had the wind direction been different, would the fire have spread to other buildings? No doubt this and other questions will be addressed in the inquiry into the events of 31 December 2015 and lessons must be learned to prevent similar dreadful accidents occurring.

While we wait for the full facts to emerge in this case, clearly in general the building regulations and the fire test data need to work together to reduce the risks of fires spreading in building facades. In the wake of tragedies in the UK there have been calls for Part B Fire Safety of the Building Regulations to be reviewed and for the guidance in Approved Document B to be clarified, particularly for tall buildings. Has the necessary drive for better thermal performance meant that more material is used to construct the facade, which in turn has implications for fire safety? Welcome to the difficult balancing acts that are product design and testing and building regulations.

The European Commission sees the need for a European assessment regime so that manufacturers of products for facades can avoid the plethora of national assessment methods in Europe and clearly demonstrate a product’s performance in a fire. The Commission is currently looking at the combination of two assessment methods: a large scale test method based on BS 8414-1 and a smaller test method based on a test used typically in Germany. While the large scale method should provide vital information on how the facade of a tall building would behave in a fire, it is expensive. While the small scale method is cheaper and can ensure the fire safety of facades when supplemented with other regulations, at least in the view of some regulators, it is not possible to correlate the results between the two tests. The Commission is currently consulting on two options to allow regulators to choose between a large scale test method and a small scale test method to meet their national requirements.

Either way, there does appear to be a need for more test data in this regard and for an increased understanding of how tests on components relate to small scale tests and in turn how these relate to large scale tests. While the costs of testing may be great, the risks are even greater. This is a very important topic that we are planning to include in our Technical Conference on 12 May 2016.