- Author
-
Wolski, A.
- Title
- Addressing Building Fire Safety as an Acceptable Risk-Problem: A guide for Developing Performance-Based Fire Safety Regulations.
- Coporate
- Worcester Polytechnic Inst., MA
- Report
-
THESIS
March 1999
183 p.
- Keywords
-
performance based codes
|
regulations
|
fire safety
|
risk assessment
- Abstract
- Performance-based building fire safety codes, currently under development in the United States, are new approaches to manage the building fire safety risk-problem. This thesis provides guidance for code developers and regulators for use in "the optimization and promulgation of performance-based building fire safety codes. How well a given regulation contends with technical, social and political uncertainties is an indication of a regulation's potential for success. A set of criteria is proposed as a means to evaluate how well a regulation accommodates these uncertainties. The better a regulation complies with the criteria, the better chance the regulation has for successful promulgation in society. In this study, the criteria are applied to various regulated technologies including nuclear power plant design, seismic/structural design, environmental protection, food technology, and building fire safety. It is shown that the success of a regulatory approach in a given industry can be closely linked to adherence to the criteria. Understanding why regulations in each of the non-building fire safety areas succeeded, failed, or evolved provides lessons to the building fire safety regulatory community. Two fundamental recommendations are culled Corn these lessons: I. A performance-based code should be part of a new performance-based code system. II. The framework of the new system should be based on probability or risk concepts. The seven criteria can be used as seven guiding principles during the development of a new regulation. A hypothetical example is used to illustrate this process. A group of building code developers uses the principles to evaluate and improve a proposed fire safety goal that is limited to life safety. The group concludes that a fire safety goal limited to life safety is not acceptable; the proposed goal does not comply with the seven principles. The group concludes that a three-part code, that separately considers life safety, property protection, and fire-lighting needs may offer a better approach, one that better complies with the principles. A paper in the Appendix discusses perceptions of risk in the context of building fire safety. Based on the concepts of Revealed Preference and Risk Conversion Factors, two methods are proposed to accommodate perceptions of risk in a performance-based building fire safety code.