FIRE SAFETY IN BUILDINGS (A CASE STUDY ON BUGIS STREET)

Abstract

Fire safety has always been an imperative element in the design of commercial buildings in Singapore. Although its strict legislations and fire code can improve the overall fire safety, the failure in providing adequate means of escape in the design makes safe evacuation impossible. This greatly compromises public safety as unsafe evacuation consequently escalates the magnitude of risk in fatalities. However, little or no such information is available to bring to light the inadequacy and hence the significance of this study is important and essential to justifying the inadequate means of escape which compromises public safety in Bugis Street.

The study employed the use of commercial CFD PyroSim and Pathfinder and significant amount of efforts have been spent in designing numerous simulations to study the spread of fire and its induced smoke to justify that safe evacuation warrants life safety and public safety. For example, initial simulations using a fire size of 1000 kW/m2 were found to be too intense for a realistic study, and hence smaller scale of 100 kW/m2 were used. Later trials of simulations have also seen the random positioning of fire around the simulated area to simulate and determine the worst scenario.

Nevertheless, the simulation results have shown that the simulated fire took 15 minutes to progress from ignition through fully developed phase to the decay phase with flash over occurring at 120th second time interval. The comparison of results have further shown that at this time interval, 620 out of 710 occupants were able to escape while the remaining 90 occupants remained trapped, and thus signified the causation of fatalities. The fatalities concluded from the results of the simulation studies therefore justified the inadequate means of escape and susceptibility of the building which greatly compromises life safety and creates a negative impact on public safety. Thus far, the findings and results have warranted and confirmed the high significance of this study.