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Fire Safety Engineering & Alternative Solutions

The deemed to satisfy requirements of the Building Code of Australia (BCA) can often impose unnecessary building costs as a result of conservative provisions. The BCA is however, is a performance-based code and its performance requirements can be used in order to achieve acceptable alternative solutions to prescriptive specified standards via fire safety engineering and alternative solutions. The performance requirements provide the criteria to ensure that regulatory objectives are achieved, and allow for innovative alternative solutions, and safe and cost effective building design solutions to be presented.

On any building application there may be areas where the design, whether it be the layout of the building, fire safety systems to be installed or equipment to be provided, does not comply with the deemed to satisfy provisions of the BCA or Australian Standards, alternative solutions using fire safety engineering principles should be considered.

In these instances it is most common to apply fire safety engineering principles that are aligned with the performance requirements of the BCA, on a more cost effective concept design, to enable alternative solutions to the deemed to satisfy provisions.

Fire safety engineering generally reviews the conditions of the building and creates worst case fire scenarios in order to determine the adequacy of the design and fire fighting systems to be installed in alternative solutions.

In most cases alternative solutions have found that the deletion of certain fire safety systems may be reliant on the type of building and occupant characteristics within.

It is also common that as a result of fire safety engineering analysis (as alternative solutions), other fire safety requirements are necessary in order to equalise the deletion of the subject fire safety systems, such as the installation of early warning detection systems to aid faster evacuation in an emergency.

HENDRY building surveyors have the qualifications and experience in fire safety engineering performance-based alternative solutions, and are able to assist you with your requirements.