Fire Safety Risk Assessment

A workplace fire safety risk assessment must consider persons who could be placed especially at risk in the event of fire. Explain what is meant by the term especially at risk and identify the... 

Figure 1.8 Cover of Fire Safety - Risk Assessment Factories and Warehouses (Department for Communities and...

Figure 9.6 Redrawn from Fire Safety - Risk Assessment Sleeping Accommodation (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2006), ISBN 1851128174. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and Queen s Printer for Scotland.

You must cairy out fire risk assessments, h the same way as you do for health and safety risk assessments. 

Such deliberations should form part of the environmental and safety risk assessment carried out by the operator when producing the on-site emergency plan. This should be in consultation with the environment agencies, the local authorities, the emergency services (particularly the Fire and Rescue Service) and other stakeholders. 

Methods for performing hazard analysis and risk assessment include safety review, checkhsts, Dow Fire and Explosion Index, what-if analysis, hazard and operabihty analysis (HAZOP), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis, and event tree analysis. Other methods are also available, but those given are used most often. 

Safety air technology, including risk assessment, that minimizes damages and hazards caused by accidents, fire, and explosion... 

It is the general consensus within the worldwide fire community that the only proper way to evaluate the fire safety of products is to conduct full-scale tests or complete fire-risk assessments. Most of these tests were extracted from procedures developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Because they are time tested, they are generally accepted methods to evaluate a given property. Where there were no universally accepted methods the UL developed its own. 

There are a variety of process safety risks one needs to assess with chemical processes. In general, these risks will lead to an evaluation of the potential for the process to have precipitous changes in temperature and or pressure that lead to secondary events such as detonations, explosions, over pressurizations, fires, and so forth. The most cost-effective way of avoiding these sorts of risks is through the adoption of inherent safety principles. Inherent safety principles are very similar to and complementary to pollution prevention principles, where one attempts to use a hierarchy of approaches to avoid and/or reduce the risk of an adverse event. The reader is referred elsewhere to a more complete treatment of this important area of process design. ... 

Fire safety in a particular scenario is improved by decreasing the corresponding level of fire risk or of fire hazard. Technical studies will, more commonly, address fire hazard assessment. Fire hazard is the result of a combination of several fire properties, including ignitability, flammability, flame spread, amount of heat released, rate of heat release, smoke obscuration and smoke toxicity. 

A fire risk assessment should be documented to provide a clear overall picture of the possible fire hazards and the role safety systems play in hazard control and mitigation. Also, a fire risk assessment should be maintained evergreen during the lifecycle of the facility to ensure ongoing management of fire hazards. 

The methodology outlined in this chapter follows that in Cuidelines for Chemical Process Quantitative Risk Analysis (CCPS, 2000). NFPA 550 Cu/de to the Fire Safety Concept Tree provides another example of fire risk assessment. There are three keys to a successful fire risk assessment ... 

The Phase 1 quantitative risk assessment for Pueblo and several other stockpile sites with assembled chemical munitions completed several years ago showed that the stockpile at Pueblo presents risk to public health several orders of magnitude lower than any other site. This is because it contains only mustard agent, which is less volatile than other agents, and therefore would not be carried very far in the event of a fire or explosion. Nevertheless, the Army has undertaken several risk and safety assessments to meet the legislative requirement that the technology chosen for Pueblo be as safe as or safer than the baseline system. The committee believes that the incineration technologies under consideration will have very low risk and will meet reasonable interpretations of safety criteria, even if the actual risk numbers marginally exceed the baseline criteria. 

Enforcement of fire safety codes resulting from risk assessment... 

There are a large number of different methods used for bench-scale assessment of combustion toxicity, and the applicability of test data to lire hazard assessment is not always clear. Obviously, toxic potency data should not be used in isolation but should either be a part of a classification scheme or as part of the input to lire risk and lire safety engineering assessments. It is important that uncertainty or confidence limits should be used with toxic potency data, because they are often relatively large. Fire effluent toxic potency does not have a unique value but is a function of the material and the fire conditions, particularly temperature and oxygen availability in the fire zone, and also the fire environment (enclosure, geometry, and ventilation). To assess the fire hazard, toxic potency data must be relevant to the end use fire situation, and the fire condition, which can be defined using the ISO classification of fire stages. 

Hirschler, M.M., Fire safety in rail transportation vehicles Special focus onrecent activities at the Federal Railroad Administration, NFPA 130 and ASTM E 2061, Fire Protection Research Foundation Fire Risk and Hazard Assessment Research Application Symposium, July 9-11, Baltimore, MD, 2003. 

Flammable substances used and stored in the laboratory are also subject to further risk assessment and control in UK law under the the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, the COSHH Regulations 2002, the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002 (DSEAR), and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. 

Petri net modelling tool can be considered as a suitable implementation tool for risk assessment due to its flexibility and process simulation ability (Vemez et al., 2004). In addition, different feasible process options can be modelled in a Petri net as a super model, and assessed from safety point of view. A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph including places (drawn as circles) and transitions (drawn as bars). Places contain tokens which are shown as dots. The set of arcs are divided into input and output arcs with an arrowhead on their destinations. A transition is called enabled if all input places have at least the same number of tokens as all its output places. An enabled transition fires by removing tokens from input places to output places. Places, transitions and arcs all can be weighted. Weight is an additional feature that can carry critical attribute of related node through the nets (Gu and Bahri, 2002)... 

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