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Muslims require an exclusive ablution space for preparing for daily prayers in mosques. Ablution floors seem to entail design challenges since they are often encountered in lubricated conditions from worshippers’ body cleaning manoeuvers. Accordingly, fall risks on saturated surfaces of ablution floors would be a major issue to Muslim worshippers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the safety status of mosque ablution floors in terms of slip resistance properties and surface texture.

Fifteen mosques in Dubai and Sharjah cities of the UAE were randomly chosen to investigate the safety conditions of ablution spaces. In-situ slip-resistance properties and surface finishes of each ablution floor were measured under clean, wet, and soapy conditions at two different volumes of traffic areas: heavy- and non-traffic. Surface finishes of ablution floors were also measured and analysed.

Outcomes from this study evidently showed that the inspected ablution floors were not currently protected against falls, especially under wet and soapy environments. Surface analyses identified that the present ablution floors have extremely flat surfaces (? 2 µm in the Ra parameter) so they require significant improvements against fall risks.

Regardless of the magnitude of this issue, it is scarce to attain any published study on ablution floors’ fall incidence and avoidance plans in the scientific and technical literature. There are also no officially and publicly available data on fall incidents from ablution places in mosques. Findings from this study would be a great step forward to establish safer ablution floors for Muslim prayers.

House fire risk would be minimised if fire safety principles were incorporated at the design stage. This issue is rarely addressed in the literature. The purpose of this study is to propose a multi-criteria decision-making framework to evaluate fire risk of detached house designs in the United Arab Emirates and countries of similar cultural background.

The framework was developed based on function areas where (detached) house fires start, expert opinion and recommendations derived from the published literature on residential fire safety. This framework was applied to a sample of ten public detached house designs to check the applicability of the framework and to determine how safe these designs are from a fire safety perspective.

The proposed framework is proven to be an effective preliminary fire risk evaluation tool of detached house designs, and more research is needed in this area.

The proposed framework is an encouraging first step in incorporating fire risk minimisation at the design stage of detached houses based on determining the preferred location of function areas but requires further development and validation, especially in other design settings.

The proposed framework is an initial endeavour in helping designers of detached houses to minimise fire risk and its potential effects on residents.

This research proposes a way to minimise fire risk at the design stage of detached houses.