The Fire Brigade Intervention Model

Abstract

In response to a shift towards performance-based building regulations, fire services in Australia have developed a method for quantifying their operations. This method has been released for general use by the fire safety design industry and is known as Fire Brigade intervention Model. It is an event-based methodology that considers the time taken for the various fire brigade functions to be performed. It allows for concurrent and sequential activities an ingredient missing from previous attempts at modelling firefighting operations. Flow through the algorithm is controlled by the fireground status which is a time-evolving representation of the state-of-affairs faced by an incident controller. It incorporates quantities representing the state of the fire as provided by other models and the available tire brigade resources. The strategy to be implemented is based upon it. Complementing the methodoloby is the associated data on various firefighting activities. This was collected through field testing. Results are distributed in time and depending on the margin for safety desired, a value for the time to complete a given task can be included at the appropr~ate point in the calculation. The final result depends on a critical time path through the range of activities that are undertaken. This final time represents the total time for fire brigade operations for the building and fire scenario under consideration. This gives designers a rational quantification of fire brigade operations to be used in the design process.