This book investigates the feasibility of developing a tool that enables fire departments to estimate the value of their services to a community in terms of environmental and financial impact. This book provides a summary of this effort, which resulted in development of a prototype tool for fire department use. The impact of fire on a community is usually measured in terms of the number of fires, human casualties, and property damage. There are, however, more subtle impacts of fire that are not so easily estimated but contribute to the measure of overall performance of the fire service in protecting a community. While environmental and economic impact assessment methodologies exist as separate systems, they generally require a high level of knowledge that is outside the scope of most fire departments. A relatively simple methodology for estimating the environmental and economic impact of fires helps communities understand the degree to which fire department activities can benefit a community's environmental and economic well-being. The scope and approach for this prototype tool is explained, including risk assessment, cost benefit analysis, life cycle assessment, integration and implementation, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. It includes multiple case studies and offers statistical support for future expansion of the tool. Fire service professionals will find this a useful new approach to presenting value in a community, as well as a method for examining their own financial and environmental plans.

Environmental concerns and advances in architectural technologies have lead to a greater number of green buildings or buildings with green, eco-friendly elements. However, from a practical standpoint, there is no incident reporting system in the world that tracks data on fire incidents in green buildings. Fire safety objectives are not explicitly considered in most green rating schemes, and green design features have been associated with photovoltaic panels and roof materials, lightweight timber frame buildings, and combustible insulation materials. Fire Safety Challenges of Green Buildings is the result of an extensive global literature review that sought to identify issues related to green building elements or features and ways to ensure those issues are tracked for future improvement. The book identifies actual incidents of fires in green buildings or involving green building elements, points out issues with green building elements that would increase fire risk, clarifies reports and studies that address ways to reduce fire risk in green design elements, and compares research studies that explicitly incorporate fire safety into green building design. The authors also pinpoint gaps and specific research needs associated with understanding and addressing fire risk and hazards with green building design. Using their data, the authors developed a set of matrices relating these green attributes and potential fire hazards. With these comprehensive tools, potential mitigation strategies for addressing the relative increase in fire risk or hazard associated with the green building elements and features have been identified. Fire Safety Challenges of Green Buildings is intended for practitioners as a tool for analyzing building safety issues in green architecture and developing methods for tracking data related to green design elements and their potential hazards. Researchers working in a related field will also find the book valuable.

The definitive architectural resource on designing for egress, evacuation, and life safety

Egress systems, in concert with evacuation plans and crowd management, form the fundamental basis of good life-safety design for emergency events, yet there are fewcomplete and comprehensive reference books covering the broad nature of this subject.

This book fills this gap by providing a comprehensive review of egress design and analysis, covering egress fundamentals and strategies, performance solutions, human behavior, evacuation modeling, evacuation planning, and crowd management. The authors, both recognized experts in the field, present egress concepts that are both prescriptive and performance-based, accounting for human behavior in emergency conditions as well as a range of expected hazards.

Contents include:

A review of historic and recent tragic life-loss fire events

An overview of prescriptive and performance-based U.S. building codes

Practical design solutions for a wide range of occupancies

Techniques for coordinating egress systems with other critical life safety systems