- Author
-
Hall, J. R., Jr.
- Title
- National Container Fire Risk Analysis Project. Technical Report.
- Coporate
- National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, MA
- Report
-
Technical Report,
March 1994,
223 p.
- Distribution
- AVAILABLE FROM National Fire Protection Research Foundation (NFPRF), 1 Batterymarch Park, Quincy, MA 02269-9101. Telephone: 617-984-7283; Fax: 617-984-7010. Website: http://www.nfpa.org
- Keywords
-
fire risk analysis
|
flammable liquids
|
combustible liquids
|
cost effectiveness
|
fire safety
|
storage
|
shopping centers
|
ignition
|
scenarios
|
sprinklers
|
sensitivity analysis
- Abstract
- Every fire safety decision is a fire risk decision. When people say what being fire safe means to them, they use language that translates into measures of fire risk, not the kinds of measures used in fire tests or any other type of fire-related calculation. This exercise calculates fire risk as a series of fire growth modeling runs in which the probabilities are summed for all runs whose scenarios lead to unacceptable severity. This project was designed to address certain fire safety questions from a particular context and point of view. It could not identify zero-risk options, because it was known going in that no suppression system is totally reliable and that in the absence of a working suppression system, no combination of other fire protection provisions would suffice to prevent hugely destructive fires in all cases. The project was not needed to identify a lowest-feasible-risk option, because previous testing had shown dominant alternatives on all or nearly all dimensions of choice, e.g., type of container, type of suppression system. In particular, Table A-17 of Appendix A merely confirmed what was already generally known --- that in tests of similarly constructed containers, metal always does as well as plastic and sometimes/often does better. What then was left for this project to do? The premise of this project was that it was of interest to determine the magnitude of fire risk associated with major alternative approaches to fire protection and to determine which fire protection requirements showed the greatest impact on the level of fire risk achieveable. The purposes of this project were to provide fire risk analysis estimates for certain major alternatives in the containerizing and protection of consumer products of flammable or combustible liquids; to provide a general model and methodology that could be used to estimate risk analysis; to identify patterns of sensitivity or leverage in the results; and to identify patterns of uncertainty in the analysis.