Status of Performance Fire Codes in the USA.
Status of Performance Fire Codes in the USA.
(805 K)
Snell, J. E.
VTT-Technical Research Center of Finland and Forum for
International Cooperation in Fire Research. Nordic Fire
Safety Engineering Symposium. Development and
Verification of Tools for Performance Codes. August
30-September 1, 1993, Espoo, Finland, 1-9 pp, 1993.
Keywords:
fire safety; safety engineering; codes; fire codes;
regulations
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to report on the status of
performance fire codes in the United States. The bottom
line is that construction related research and
development in the USA are seeking to guide the
construction industry through the same transformation
manufacturing industry is experiencing. This involves
exploiting advances in science and technology, and
modern concepts of manufacturing quality to assure life
cycle quality and performance. For fire safety, this
means engineering fire safety into products and
buildings and providing means to assure that a facility
is safe in use. This can not be done using traditional
regulatory methods, nor accomplished by national edict.
Rather, creative partnerships between industry,
government and academe are needed to devise new
strategies and engineering tools; and international
scale research and cooperation are needed for
development and implementation of global standards and
conformity assessment systems. After briefly describing
the context for building and fire safety regulation in
the USA, the status of development and implementation of
performance-based fire safety engineering practices is
discussed. The paper concludes with some observations
about critical conditions for success of fire safety
engineering and its application to building fire safety
regulation.
