Dr Martina Manes PhD

The analysis examined pre- and post-fire conditions such as fuel types, ignitions, and causes, as well as evaluation of damage, financial losses and effectiveness of automatic suppression systems. More than half a million fire incidents for fire statistics in England and the USA was obtained from the Home Office and the US Fire Administration, respectively. The research updated the fire safety data available from 1966 to 1987 that was used in the British Standard PD 7974-7:2003 with current USA and English fire statistics. In particular, the fire frequency in PD 7974-7:2003 appeared greater than the estimates provided by statistics from the UK and USA. Therefore, the need for updates and continuous analysis of fire safety data appears necessary in order to understand the evolution of fire safety parameters. Furthermore, the response time of the fire brigades has been examined to understand the potential fire scenarios faced by firefighters.

Fire statistics data from England and the USA and engineering judgements were adopted to estimate the severity of the outcomes through an event tree analysis. This methodology investigates various fire scenarios, enables the assessment of multiple functioning and failing systems, and quantifies the potential benefits of fire precautions. The differences in the fields recorded in the two fire statistics have determined the creation of specific event tree analysis for England and the USA. The response to fire by the fire brigade and occupants, as well as fire damage, were investigated considering the presence and performances of alarms and automatic extinguishing systems, respectively. This resulted in an increased awareness, with a particular focus on fire scenarios and structural damage, which could be included as inputs in fire safety design of various buildings and integrated with the results from fault tree and cost-benefit analyses.

The term resilience is being more widely adopted in fire safety engineering, however, its comprehensive description is not clearly explained or correctly applied in practice. This research, therefore, defined the categories, dimensions, characteristics, capacities, objectives and missions possessed by resilience to provide a holistic understanding of the term followed by an analysis and classification of the UK Standards and Codes addressing resilience considering their administrative and engineering features of resilience, and their resilience dimensions with definitions of fire resilience measures and approaches. A practical example of a fire resilience framework was applied in educational buildings and a fire resilience design framework created in which structural and fire safety engineering were considered.