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

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.