Protect and serve

By Dean McGrail

As construction slows in the MENA region, the world of fire protection continues it’s relentless battle to prevent the loss of life and safeguard it’s clients. Dean McGrail opens up on the steps being taken to do precisely that.

“The human interface into all fire safety management and prevention, detection and suppression is a key issue.”
-Dean McGrail

Walk into any office, in any building, almost anywhere in the world and within seconds you're sure to pass one of the members of the 'danger-red' club sitting dormant on the wall. With their cautionary instructions and shiny exteriors, these last-resort devices have become standard in all commercial buildings over the years - and with very good reason. From fire extinguishers to alarms, blankets to sprinklers - these modest beacons of fire suppression have saved innumerable lives through partnering with quick-thinkers and industry experts alike. But none of this would be possible without the correct understanding of and commitment to fire protection that has created and permeated an entire industry.

Of course, fire is fire no matter what context you put it in; whether it's snowing or sweltering outside, the right conditions indoors can create a potential disaster site. Combine that with arid conditions and world-beating skyscrapers and you've got the current state-of-play for the MENA region. Fortunately for all those sat blissfully unaware in their offices, the region is also host to some of the best in the industry when it comes to 'pre-planned fire-fighting'.

"The single biggest concern in the MENA region" begins Dean McGrail, Operations Director of Specialist Services at WSP Fire and a big thinker in the Middle Eastern fire protection scene, "is probably the high external air pressures. That's quite a significant impact on smoke control systems, so it removes areas where we can use natural smoke vents in atriums and shopping mall designs - predominantly due to the fact that the temperature of the smoke is not hot enough to get out of the vents because of the high external air temperatures, and of course stratification."

Indeed, combined with the extreme external air temperatures is another well-known characteristic of the MENA region: skyscrapers. With the external air temperatures resulting in a subsequent movement of air down the colossal buildings, the much appreciated internal air conditioning results in a differentiation in internal and external temperatures - known as a "reverse stack effect" - both issues that are predominantly related to environments such as the UAE, for example. To put the icing on the cake, McGrail also cites the final usual suspect aggravating conditions as the unavoidable levels of prevalent dust, which often clog up vents and door closers.

With such a multitude of factors affecting the arena of potential fire, it is important to note that the inherent differences between fire suppression and fire prevention can often be combined in what McGrail refers to as a "fire safety management and maintenance plan". "That covers everything from fire prevention, to having wardens going around and making sure there's not papers stacked against heaters or that exit doors are open.

"Likewise, if a fire dies occur, human detection is obviously the most rapid form of fire detection you can possibly have, followed by suppression using fire extinguishers. The human interface into all fire safety management and prevention, detection and suppression is a key issue. If we're looking at systems, there's obviously smoke and heat detection. There's also a few more advanced systems, including aspirating smoke detectors, which use an air sampling style of smoke detection that draws smoke into a sampler and then measures quantities of smoke particulates.

"Then you have truly cutting-edge technologies such as CCTV based systems and video imaging or video smoke detection. Of course, fire suppression sprinklers are still there; it's an old technology, but still one of the best understood by the majority of designers. They're very simplistic to install and maintain - and typically 98 percent effective. However, probably the most important from my perspective is the fire safety management plans that make all of these other systems work effectively."

With constant updates in technology and the envelope of innovation forever being pushed, both McGrail and the industry have witnessed new and intriguing technologies that protect more than just the client crop up in recent months. "Probably the biggest one that we're seeing now," reveals McGrail, "is a move to new gaseous suppression systems. There was obviously a lot of worry about 10 or 15 years ago to do with depletion of the ozone layer. What we're finding now is that a lot of these new gaseous systems are looking at lower atmospheric lifetimes, so the time that they survive within the atmosphere is as low as reasonably possible. It's no longer 1000 years, but as low as 2 years before they disappear now. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of that in the future."

There's no escaping that with a difference in technology comes a change in standards. McGrail states that on his arrival to MENA six years ago, there was undoubtedly a "mismatch of codes" that was ultimately down to the designer to decide upon. Fast-forward to the present and there's been a big push towards American standards - particularly those of the National Fire Protection Association codes (NFPA). Returning to the bread and butter of MENA architecture, skyscraper codes have also had to evolve to keep pace with fire protection plans.

"The codes used to classify a high-rise building as anything above 23 meters, so they would treat that building the same as they would a building of 1000 meters. From a design point of view, we need to know how the building will react, so you start to look at performance based designs and that takes a view of the whole building package: how the building occupants react and how smoke is going to react in the building. Again, returning to the idea of reverse stack attack, what happens if you lose a staircase? Well, we're starting to see a movement towards the use of elevator evacuation in very high-rise buildings, so there are strategies being developed to make use of elevators to speed up evacuation times."

Of course, when a fire does break out, the prevention aspect pales into insignificance, making way for the 'passive protection' cavalry. The aim of the game? To reduce fire damage to a building once prevention has failed. However, with the construction industry going through a rough phase at the moment, the fire protection industry has received somewhat of a knock-on effect, reducing the opportunities to implement new passive rationales and technologies.

"The type of work that we're usually involved in has changed somewhat," admits McGrail. "There's a lot of people now looking to continue in their current buildings, so not as many are looking to move into new buildings". This has resulted in a shifting from new technologies in sparkly new building, to McGrail and his team undertaking fire safety audits and due diligence studies within existing buildings to bring them up to current standards. "There's still a lot of work for us out here, but the type of work that we're doing has changed. There's not as many of the crazy projects; the 1600 metre towers and the twisting towers and what have you. It's a lot more standard building stock, which is obviously far more cost effective."

Is this a taste of the future? Who knows. But according to McGrail one thing is certain, sustainability needs to be high on the agenda of fire protection and suppression. "There are contradictions between what we're looking at for life safety against those of sustainable design. I can see that being a big area for development in the future and it's something that we're looking at in within WSP as well, working with our environmental colleagues on developing environmental codes and the impact that they could have on fire protection codes. As clients become more educated - and with civil defense authorities as well - there's a much bigger push for the fire consultant to actually follow the design through to practical completion. That'll become more of a regulatory requirement in the future."