Joe Cilia, technical manager at the AIS FPDC, announced that his organisation has agreed a collaboration with the Fire Protection Association and the ASFP to introduce a new fire-risk signalling system.The agreement was made during the FIREX exhibition at the Excel, London where Cilia spoke before a live audience about the installation of fire-rated partitions and doors.
The labels contained in rolls of sticky tape will have a QR code to notify anyone working on a roof or partition about the need to preserve the integrity of the material and ensure any incisions or gaps are filled with intumescent pacifiers.
“It’s all about saving lives”, said Cilia who also revealed that Encon Insulation Ltd, a leading independent UK distributor of thermal materials, has agreed to implement the labels with their insulations.
Cilia outlined the minutiae required to make sure the door or window was safe for your particular environment. “The devil is in the detail and you shouldn’t be scared to ask about it,” he said.
The testing regime put doors through a 900 degrees celsius pressurised furnace – three times the heat of a cooking oven.
A door that passes the half-hour fire resistance test isn’t automatically the right door, said Cilia. “You can’t assume fire tested doors can have a universal application.”
Cilia emphasised the importance of checking detail and used the example of the 14 storey Lakanal House building in Peckham in where six people including a baby lost their lives in 2009. The fire spread over eight floors and an inquest heard how design flaws in the building were a cause of the fire spreading so rapidly.
“If it was me installing the doors and windows I wouldn’t want something like that on my conscious”, said Cilia.
Value Engineering was an area identified by the speaker where things could go wrong as people attempted to cut corners.
Where can it all go wrong?
What you should do
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