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.