Fire starters

In the news, some stories are seasonal. In the Gulf there are three distinct stories that roll round every year.

In winter it’s the annual downpour, which brings flooded streets, traffic chaos and site shut downs. Calls for better drainage and infrastructure improvements follow shortly afterward.

Come summer and the headlines turn to the midday work ban and the less predictable, but far more dangerous, spate of fires. In the last few weeks we’ve had a run of them and while the region has a patchy history on fire safety, it is always visibly worse around this time of year.

So what’s happened so far? An oil and chemical storage unit at a factory in Dubai’s Al Quoz was razed by fire.

In Ajman a rubber factory caught alight. A blaze in a cargo vehicle at the Saudi/UAE border added to the usual crossing chaos as the tailback, already 25km long, was made even worse when a checkpoint was closed for a day.

In Abu Dhabi a fire broke out at an apartment building, Alrayyana, being constructed adjacent to the Abu Dhabi Golf Course.

There, workers were uninjured thanks to observance of the midday break, but reports suggest that the dry and windy conditions exacerbated the issue, causing the fire to spread to the top floors of three more buildings, before it was contained.

Elsewhere in Abu Dhabi two apartments were destroyed in a fire that broke out at in an 11-storey building in the Tourist Club Area (TCA).

This is just a smattering of the latest fire stories from a few main centres. The question is what can be done to ease the burden being placed on each municipality’s civil defence force?

While there have been improvements in fire protection systems and their regulation over the years, the authorities need to continue to provide guidelines and recommendations to enhance the quality of fire protection and fire safety on a regular basis.

Authorities have, for the most part, shown their willingness to clamp down on fire safety regulation. Abu Dhabi, for example, is implementing an International Fire Code, based on the International Code Council standards in the US, requiring all new buildings and extensions to have emergency exits, working alarms, smoke detectors, and sprinklers systems.

It also helps if fire protection needs are considered right at the start of the design process and include suitable measures for safety during construction. However, this is frequently far from the case, especially in that most flammable of industrial structures, the warehouse.

All too often fire safety is not considered until the build is well under way, instead of putting the systems in place at the beginning, when better account can be taken of issues, such as weight loading and water demand.

Effective compartmentation can stop any potential fire spreading, a key issue in densely packed industrial areas. There have been instances where fires have spread through such areas, hitting surrounding buildings fast and hard, because the fire could not be contained to a portion of one site.

Until such issues are addressed and backed up with regulation and enforcement, we can continue to expect an annual fire season.