Smoke and Water

Recent fires in high rises have raised awareness of the need to have a reliable fire engineering system installed

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The importance of a reliable fire engineering system was brought home in stark and terrifying circumstances to a group of high-rise apartment dwellers in Sharjah recently. In the early hours of a balmy November morning, they were shaken out of their slumber by the wailing of their building’s fire alarms and the hiss of its sprinkler systems.

Thankfully, there were no fatalities, though six people were treated for smoke inhalation and other related injuries. Although the building was completely gutted, the performance of its fire engineering systems probably helped save dozens of lives that night.

It is incidents such as this that provide Graeme Stewart with some measure of satisfaction at a job well done. As an associate with Ramboll, Stewart works with the Building Services division, where he supervises the installation of fire engineering and life protection systems into high rise projects.

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“Life safety is the priority of fire safety systems,” he says, “you don’t really care if the building falls down once everyone is out safe,” he says.

“Fire systems are generally two fold. They’re for life safety purposes, to allow the people in the building to escape satisfactorily, and secondly to ensure that the building remains standing while people are trying to escape to safety.”

Given the prevalence of high-rise buildings throughout the UAE, the need for a dependable system is essential, says Peterson Melegrito, a fire engineer, also with Ramboll.

“With high-rise buildings, the main issue is pressure. In Dubai, the maximum distance between water pumps is 90 metres. If that height is exceeded, another pump set will have to be installed.”

Stewart added that as a general rule of thumb a mechanical plant room is installed every 25 floors, with dedicated pump sets on each level to pump water into the systems in the event of an emergency.

In addition, the sprinkler systems are often integrated into the build management systems, which make it easier to control and identify fire threats that may spring up, Melegrito says.

“The design of the sprinklers is basically integrated with the fire alarm systems. If there is a sprinkler open in any area, if you’re inside the BMS room, you should know where that sprinkler is.

Basically, we design a floor in terms of zones, so there’s a First Zone, a Second Zone and so on. For every zone, there’s a Zone Check Valve, which is integrated into the BMS system, into the fire alarm panel, if there’s any sprinkler open in that zone, it will alert the control panel so that you can determine where that zone is” he explains.

In addition, he says that the BMS system can also be used to monitor the levels in the building’s water tanks.