Design of Fire Protection Systems for Tall Buildings - Case Study Example

The recent examples of fires resulting into complete collapse are the WTC 1, 2 and 7. Then the complete collapse of Apartment Block in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 3.2002, then Jackson Street apartments in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on Feb 8, 2002. A list of collapses has been provided in Appendix 2 of all the collapse that was seen in the past. The concept of fireproof construction is that the despite the complete burnout of the structure, the structure must not collapse at any cost. For this, there are two steps that are taken by the standards and other implementation bodies.

Firstly the building should be resistant to fire for a certain level which about 3 hrs, this is done to safeguard from the collapse of structure and secondly an effective fire protection system should be in place, which is present for the purpose of detection, firefighting and for effective evacuation of inhabitants. At present, the only International Building Code IBC 2006 solely has prescriptive fire resistance construction regulations and bounds the designer to follow it for protection of a structure against fire.

IBC is also supported by the National Fire Protection Association and other similar organization, which I have discussed in detail in later sections. The Approach of this report would be very similar to the process involved in designing a fire resistant Tall building with effective fire protection system.As we are well aware of the processes through which the fire protection facility with into commission, where the first phase is the analysis and requirement determination of the fire protection, then the second is the design of these required systems, the third is the construction and finally the maintenance and operations of these systems.

Before the commencement of the design phase of a fire protection system the first and foremost step is to evaluate and analyze the building features and when does it become detrimental to design a perfect system. What is the different category of buildings and the types of construction?