Citation

Claridge E, Spearpoint M. Procedia Eng. 2013; 62: 1063-1072.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.proeng.2013.08.162

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

New Zealand's Building Code has recently been amended and has introduced a new clause specific to fire-fighting operations that requires, amongst other things, that buildings must be designed and constructed to allow fire-fighters to reach the floor of fire origin and search the general area. The Code also specifies that for certain buildings they must be designed and constructed to allow fire-fighters to be able to first apply water to the fire before specified tenability criteria have been exceeded. These new requirements and other established performance-based fire engineering methods require the times associated with various fire brigade intervention tasks and specifically arrival times to be quantified. Currently there is limited data available to allow specific calculation of fire service response times to buildings. This paper presents response time and travel speed distributions to enable calculation of the time taken for the fire service to respond to notification of a fire and arrive at a specific location. Comparisons between response times within urban and rural fire districts are presented and between three of New Zealand's largest cities, their central business districts and outer suburbs. Distributions are presented and compared to existing values suggested by the Fire Brigade Intervention Model with data given to allow the assessment of the probability of attendance.