A fire safety evaluation system for prioritizing fire improvements in old high-rise buildings in Hong Kong

Ling Tim Wong, S. W. Lau

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Fire safety in old high-rise buildings is of great concern to the general public as a result of several big fires occurred over the past 10 years. A fire safety evaluation system is essential for building engineers to quantify the fire safety level, to identify the measures to be improved and to schedule the corresponding improvements. Together with a scoring system with weighting factors derived for local buildings, this paper proposes a universal fire safety evaluation (FSE) checklist for fire safety level quantification and improvements prioritization in old high-rise buildings. In a survey, the fire safety levels of 122 old high-rise buildings in Hong Kong were quantified using the scoring system. The survey results showed that only less than 5% of the inspected samples reached the standard required for life safety. The FSE checklist was then applied to prioritize the improvement works of 10 selected buildings with the lowest scores.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)233-249
Number of pages17
JournalFire Technology
Volume43
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2007

Keywords

  • Fire safety
  • High-rise buildings
  • Hong Kong

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Materials Science
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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