Uncertainty in Estimating the Fire Control Effectiveness of Sprinklers from New Zealand Fire Incident Reports

Abstract

The current state of fire sprinkler effectiveness information has been found to be a limiting factor when comparing the fire risk for alternative building designs in New Zealand (Determination 2005/109: single means of escape from a high-rise apartment building. Department of Building and Housing, Wellington, 7). Data on the past performance of systems in real fires is one of the best sources of information to estimate future performance, but there has not been a detailed study on sprinkler effectiveness data from fire incidents in New Zealand published since Marryatt’s work (Fire: a century of automatic sprinkler protection-revised. Australian Fire Protection Association, Melbourne, 13), which was last updated in 1986 and included data from Australia. The current research looks at the quality and quantity of data available on sprinkler effectiveness from New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS) incident reports over the period of 2001 to 2010 to evaluate the data’s usefulness for risk-informed building fire safety design. A comparison is made between the number of sprinklers reported activated in the NZFS dataset, Marryatt’s study, guidance from PD 7974-7:2003 (PD 7974-7:2003: the application of fire safety engineering principles to fire safety design of buildings. Probabilistic Risk Assessment, London, 3), and NFPA data (U.S. experience with sprinklers and other automatic fire extinguishing equipment. National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, 12). Proposals to improve the collection and reporting process to increase the informative value of future NZFS data for risk-informed fire safety design are presented.