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Fire is the fundamental element of most people’s lives, and when not controlled, the same fire can lead to several catastrophes in homes, offices, schools, lives and other public places with severe repercussions. Hence, this study aims to examine the adequacy and extent of the application of fire suppression systems in residential and commercial property in Ghana.

This study adopts a sequential mixed-mode design comprising quantitative and qualitative research strategies to analyse factors to produce findings. The target population for this study includes shop occupiers, end users of office buildings, and residents in the Accra Central of Ghana. Systematic random sampling was used for the quantitative research, and a sample size of 385 was obtained using a multi-stage and cluster sampling method. A structured survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the primary data. The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics, whereas the qualitative data were analysed using content analysis.

From an empirical literature review and the analysis, the three main factors contributing to fire breakouts are equipment malfunction, improper use of heat sources and human mistakes. According to the respondents, fire suppression systems were also inadequate, as most of the suppression systems prescribed in the building code were unavailable. Regarding the ability to manually operate fire suppression systems, most property occupiers stated that they are generally unaware of these suppression systems.

This study will aid policymakers in developing interventions for fire safety enforcement by ensuring that fire safety regulations are consistently followed by design team members and property developers, resulting in a positive effect on public building structures performing their required functions. It is also critical to provide end users with education and training on how to operate the fire suppression system as well as effective handling of firefighting installations in the event of a fire.

The findings of this investigation contribute to knowledge and comprehension of the effect of fire suppression systems on building users and may serve as a precursor to the development of a “As Built” certification system for ascertaining the adequacy of fire suppression systems for new and existing residential and commercial property.

The proposed use of unlatched, reverse swing flappy doors is becoming widespread in the design of residential common corridor smoke control systems. This article explores the conceptual arguments for and against the use of these systems.

This article relies on industry experience, with reference to relevant building design practices, standards and research literature, to categorise arguments. These are collated into four common areas of concern relating to compartmentation, reliability, depressurisation and modelling practices. A final comparison is made between different common corridor smoke control system types for these four areas.

The article highlights several concerns around the use of flappy door systems, including the enforced breaches in stair compartmentation, uncertainties around system reliability, the reliance on door closers as a single point of failure, the impact of day-to-day building use on the system performance and the false confidence that modelling assessments can provide in demonstrating adequacy. The article concludes in suggesting that alternative smoke control options be considered in place of flappy door systems.

Discussion on the use of flappy door smoke control systems has been ongoing within the fire engineering community for several years, but there is limited public literature available on the topic. By collating the common arguments relating to these systems into a single article, a better understanding of their benefits and pitfalls has been provided for consideration by building design and construction professionals.

This study aims to develop a machine learning model to detect structure fire fatalities using a dataset comprising 11,341 cases from 2011 to 2019.

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) was conducted prior to modelling, in which ten machine learning models were experimented with.

The main fatal structure fire risk factors were fires originating from bedrooms, living areas and the cooking/dining areas. The highest fatality rate (20.69%) was reported for fires ignited due to bedding (23.43%), despite a low fire incident rate (3.50%). Using 21 structure fire features, Random Forest (RF) yielded the best detection performance with 86% accuracy, followed by Decision Tree (DT) with bagging (accuracy = 84.7%).

Limitations of the study are pertaining to data quality and grouping of categories in the data pre-processing stage, which could affect the performance of the models.

The study is the first of its kind to manipulate risk factors to detect fatal structure classification, particularly focussing on structure fire fatalities. Most of the previous studies examined the importance of fire risk factors and their relationship to the fire risk level.

This paper aims to provide an exemplary application of an indicative post-occupancy evaluation (POE) on an organizational multistorey residential apartment building.

This research comprises of mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches. The methodology commences with a review of the recent literature, identification of performance elements, conduct of walk-through, distribution and collection of users' surveys and the development of short and long-term recommendations, where an adequate sample of users were approached for conducting a focus group interview session.

The research identifies 74 performance elements that were clustered into technical, namely (thermal, acoustic and visual comforts, indoor air quality and safety and security), functional, namely (design adequacy, finishing, furnishing, fittings and equipment and building surroundings) dimensions and behavioral, namely (apartment building attributes and managerial and logistical support). The questionnaire survey aimed to solicit users' opinions upon the occupied case study residential facility.

The research identifies areas of occupants' satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a typical multistorey residential building, as a part of a community housings for a mega organization, located in Saudi Arabia. The identification of these areas serves as a lesson learned for future developments, design considerations and implications. Hence, improving the well-being and comfort of its employees.

Community centers play a socio-economic and urban role of combining different communal necessities, that serve inhabitants, at different neighborhoods in cities. Their role emerged in importance as being a hub for improving and customizing quality of life experiences of the public. This research presents a code-based risk assessment tool for evaluating fire safety measures that can be adapted in the context of community centers. It also provides an exemplary case study to demonstrate its application.

The study identified the factors that render community centers as a high-risk type of facilities in fire events. Various fire codes and standards were reviewed to describe the relevant fire safety measures. A code-based fire risk assessment tool was developed and implemented, through a case study. A set of recommendations were developed to improve the fire safety conditions of the case study facility.

Several violations to fire safety were identified in the case study building. The findings led to identifying a set of recommendations to improve its fire safety conditions.

This research introduced a systematic approach to raise awareness about fire incidences and consequences in community centers, and provides facilities managers with a tool, to assess compliance based on international fire code requirements.

In fire events, community centers are considered as high-risk facilities that may lead to significant losses of human lives and damages to assets. It is significant to study the causes of fire, for ensuring effective prevention and safe operations.

Urban population growth has increased housing density, which has expanded the construction of low-cost low-rise residential in urban areas. Good building performance and effective low-cost low-rise residential quality lead to higher user satisfaction and improve building sustainability. This study aims to focus on the factors influencing the sustainability of low-cost low-rise residential in the West Malaysia urban area to assess resident satisfaction.

A mixed-mode approach with both qualitative and quantitative were used in this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 stakeholders to identify the common factors influencing sustainability in low-cost low-rise residential. Subsequently, questionnaire surveys were formed and distributed among building users to determine the satisfaction level with low-cost low-rise residential building performance.

The finding demonstrates that accessibility is the key factor to achieving sustainability of low-cost low-rise residential. The finding also related to the factor that influences both stakeholders and building user satisfaction levels. This study also identifies key areas that require attention to improve user satisfaction with building sustainability and building performance of low-cost low-rise residential.

This study aims to determine stakeholder and building user satisfaction levels in relation to the sustainable building factor. A few indicators have been set up to identify the factors that most influence the sustainability and environment of low-cost low-rise residential buildings. Each subchapter has a few recommendations to improve the performance of low-cost low-rise residential. Each of the factors mentioned is related to social, economic and environmental sustainability. In addition, the study discovered a strong connection between low-cost low-rise residential performance and user satisfaction.

This study aims to explore occupants’ perceived importance and satisfaction with high-rise students’ housing facilities’ fire safety considerations (FSCs). The specific objectives are to explore the FSCs for high-rise students’ housing facilities and assess the level of importance and satisfaction with the FSCs provided in high-rise students’ housing facilities in controlling fire outbreaks.

The study uses an exploratory sequential design with an initial qualitative phase followed by a quantitative data collection phase. Twenty FSCs were identified through the qualitative phase via semistructured interviews. Their importance and satisfaction were revealed through survey questionnaires with 168 respondents who stayed in or were involved in the operation of high-rise students’ housing facilities. Data from the qualitative phase were analyzed thematically, and those obtained from the quantitative phase were analyzed descriptively and inferentially.

The study’s findings revealed that all the 20 FSCs identified via the qualitative phase and confirmed through the quantitative phase were perceived to be very important in fighting fires in high-rise students’ housing facilities. However, only 9 out of the 20 FSCs received some satisfaction among the respondents in fighting fires in the facilities.

This study offers insight into a rare study area, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, it grants insight into the occupants’ perspective regarding which FSCs they consider essential and their level of satisfaction with such FSCs in fighting fires in high-rise students’ housing facilities.

The rapid development of urban areas in Sleman District, Indonesia, has created new challenges for firefighting response services. One of the primary challenges is to identify the optimal locations for new fire stations, to improve service quality and maximize service coverage within the specified time.

This paper proposes a method for precisely calculating travel time that integrates delay time caused by traffic lights, intersections and congestion. The study highlights the importance of precise calculation of travel time in order to provide a more accurate understanding of the service area covered by the fire stations. The proposed method utilizes network analysis in ArcGIS, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and simple additive weighting (SAW) to accurately calculate travel time and to identify the best locations for new fire stations. The identification of new site was based on service safety, service quality, service costs and demographic factors and applied to the Sleman district in Indonesia.

The results showed that the total area covered by old and new fire stations decreased from 61% to 31.8% of the study area when the adjusted default speed scenario was implemented.

The results indicated that the default speed scenario could provide misleading information about the service area, while the adjusted default speed scenario improved service quality and maximized service coverage.

The proposed method provides decision-makers with an effective tool to make informed decisions on optimal locations for new fire stations and thus enhance emergency response and public safety.

The paper aims to understand Finnish architects' attitudes towards the use of timber as a structural material in multi-storey (over two--storeys high) residential construction.

The study was conducted through a literature survey mainly including international peer-reviewed journals and similar research projects. Furthermore, the literature survey informed the generation of the web-based survey questionnaire design to gather information on architects' perceptions, attitudes and interest in the use of wood in multi-storey (over two-storeys high) residential buildings.

The paper's findings are as follows: (1) respondents perceived the most important advantages of wood as a lightweight, local and ecological material; (2) wood construction (compared to concrete) included perceived concerns about it being more costly and needing more complex engineering and (3) respondents had a favourable overall attitude towards the use of wood particularly in low-rise residential construction, whilst their perception of tall housing, including timber ones, was mostly negative.

No studies have evaluated the use of wood in tall residential buildings and architects' perceptions in Finland.

This research paper aims to investigate reinforced concrete (RC) walls' behaviour under fire and identify the thermal and mechanical factors that affect their performance.

A three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model is developed to predict the response of RC walls under fire and is validated through experimental tests on RC wall specimens subjected to fire conditions. The numerical model incorporates temperature-dependent properties of the constituent materials. Moreover, the validated model was used in a parametric study to inspect the effect of the fire scenario, reinforcement concrete cover, reinforcement ratio and configuration, and wall thickness on the thermal and structural behaviour of the walls subjected to fire.

The developed 3D FE model successfully predicted the response of experimentally tested RC walls under fire conditions. Results showed that the fire resistance of the walls was highly compromised under hydrocarbon fire. In addition, the minimum wall thickness specified by EC2 may not be sufficient to achieve the desired fire resistance under considered fire scenarios.

There is limited research on the performance of RC walls exposed to fire scenarios. The study contributed to the current state-of-the-art research on the behaviour of RC walls of different concrete types exposed to fire loading, and it also identified the factors affecting the fire resistance of RC walls. This guides the consideration and optimisation of design parameters to improve RC walls performance in the event of a fire.