Questionnaire on FSE in Europe

SFPE Europe is conducting a survey on the status of fire safety engineering in Europe. For this, we need your help! So far we've collected answers from the following countries:

Belgium Denmark Estonia  Finland  France Germany Italy Norway

Poland Spain Sweden

Switzerland

If your country is not on the list above (or if you have good contacts in another), please send an e-mail to me: michael.stromgren@sp.se and I'll get back to you with the questionnaire. This help is greatly appreciated as we then can work better towards the goal of better fire safety in Europe by proper fire safety engineering.

Heading towards a Fire Safe Europe

Meeting location of the Fire Safe Europe
meeting in Brussels.

Last week I attended a meeting with the Science Advisory Board that is part of Fire Safe Europe. Fire Safe Europe is working for greater awareness of fire safety among policy-makers, both at the European level and in the member states - which I think is great. One of the important questions when working with risk management is risk communication and risk awareness. Societies often tend to be very reactive - we adjust regulation and legislation after incidents happen. With this approach we will always lag behind. Raising risk awareness then, is therefore a great. We need to be aware of the risks, and how to manage them, before accidents happen.


There's also another side of the problem - we also need to do just evaluation of the actual risks. If not, we will end up mismanaging the risks - putting protection where it's not effective and thus wasting societal resources. So how is Europe doing today in the area of fire safety? In fact, that's a quite hard question to answer. It may even be hard to answer on a national level. There is no harmonised way of collected data on fires, or on doing deeper fire investigations. I believe that we need improve our way of collecting information in several ways:


- Better and harmonized statistics. Statistics say that the fire risk in Sweden is five times higher than in the Netherlands. Are the statistics comparable, and if they are correct - what's the underlying reason to the differences? For development and improvement we need good numbers we can trust.
- Deep fire investigations including the response and effect of fire safety systems in buildings. Often, fire investigation tend to focus on blame - who caused the fire? Or, on the actions of the fire brigade, or maybe on how the fire progressed. The invesigations seldom look into fire safety system of the building. Sweden recently expanded the national fire investigation programme to study the behaviour of fire safety systems in buildings - which is commendable! However, it'd be great to exchange experiences to a greater degree with other countries. Many of the most significant fires, leading to change of regulation, are few-time events and since Europe consists of many small countries it would be very benifical to increase the statistical base. For a small country like Sweden the number of buildings are simply not enough to draw conclusions on the relatively "rare" significant fires.
- Pre-fire investigations of fire safety in new and old buildings. There is little, or no, greater investigations about the actual fire safety in buildings. For all of the technical aspects of buildings, several errors may occur, leading to a lower quality. For fire safety, we may have problems with design methods, design assumptions, inadequate workmanshop and when the building is finished - failing maintenance. What do we know of the fire safety of buildings after one, ten or even fifty years? Knowing this becomes increasingly important as we today have tools to optimize fire safety in a new fashion. With narrower safety margins we also need to be able to trust the end results to a higher degree.


Next year the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) will come into full effect in Europe. That will also mean higher competence need for building owners/contractors. CE-marking is no guarantee for fulfilment of fire safety regulation. The CPR focuses on harmonizing the internal market in Europe - we should be able to trade across the borders in Europe. While many of the common European methods resembles the old national ones - we also have an enirely new situation when it comes to verification of fire safety. There is clearly a need to  sure that we keep the actual fire safety at a high level. And for that, we need to measure the actual fire safety level.


Without proper information, and hard facts, on the actual problems we're facing - we'll be stuck in engineering guesswork. We need the information to know where to put the resources. Still, there's a number of things we can start with already. Several tools can be improved, sometimes by fine tuning, and some times more radical changes may be needed.


- regulations, standards and guidelines
- systems for review and control
- levels of competence and qualification of practitioners


In the end, we want the adequate fire safety measures based on the associated risks. Fire safety should also be efficient. We have a lot more competence in Europe today than we had twenty years ago. We have the tools to evaluate and improve fire safety. We just need to use them right. With better information, and better use of the information, we'll have an even greater opportunity to continue our work for a Fire Safe Europe.

Omstart på BBR-turnén - nya datum!

Nöjda deltagare efter kursdagen i Malmö i mars

Förra veckan blev jag tyvärr sjuk och tvingades flytta fram de tre BBR-utbildningarna som jag skulle hållt i Linköping, Stockholm och Sundsvall.  Som tur är har jag väldigt bra medarbetare som kunde hjälpa mig att snabbt planera om utbildningarna - stort tack till Kaisa och Erika för det! Nu hoppas jag verkligen att de nya datumet inte ställer till det för de som redan var anmälda - ledsen om detta orsakat problem! Sen hoppas jag så klart att fler nu kan få chansen, med nya tider kommer också en andra chans att anmäla sig.

Och när jag nu har varit hemma sjuk och inte kunnat använda rösten har jag däremot hunnit titta på utvärderingsenkäterna. Av de som fyllt i enkäterna (mer än hälften) så rekommenderar 98 % andra att gå utbildningen - kul! Extra kul eftersom det är svårt att göra en blandad målgrupp nöjd. En viss kunskap om brandskydd och BBR krävs för att få ut mycket av kursen. Deltagarna har varit representerade av räddningstjänst, brandkonsulter, fastighetsägare, byggnadsnämnd, försäkringsbolag, byggproduktindustri, arkitekter och kontrollansvariga.

Så ta nu chansen att delta på något av följande tillfällen. Anmälan kan göras upp till en vecka innan kurstillfället, men antalet platser är begränsade:
16/4 Linköping
24/4 Luleå
15/5 Stockholm
16/5 Sundsvall

Och efter husmorsråd ska jag fortsätta med en kur av ingefära och honung så att jag håller mig frisk ;)


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Kursanmälan: http://www.sp.se/sv/training/Sidor/brandskyddsregler.aspx