In the early hours of March 6, a fire broke out at the ALA Pub in Greater Taichung, tragically taking the lives of nine people and injuring 12. The pub had undergone 21 safety inspections in five years and passed on almost every occasion, including the most recent one, on Feb. 17. How, you might ask, can a building be up to standard in safety inspections and yet still not be really safe? Do fire safety laws need to be amended? The truth is that without a thorough review and comprehensive corrections to relevant laws, systems and management, such regrettable events can hardly be avoided.
Fire safety equipment is supposed to be designed and installed in accordance with the Standards for Installation of Fire Safety Equipment Based on Use and Occupancy, while fire prevention equipment and fire escapes are governed by the Building Code. These formulistic laws and regulations may be suitable for general standardized buildings, such as newly constructed office blocks and newly built residential property, but they are not so suitable for some buildings with other kinds of spatial or environmental conditions, such as older buildings, atrium spaces, clean rooms, nuclear power plants and so on. Such cases call for an assessment of their specific conditions, including fire risk factors, the functions and special features of the space, the nature and number of the people using it, fire detection and alarms, escape conditions and escape time, fire restraint and control, structural fire protection, foreseeable losses in the case of fire and so on, so that a comprehensive design plan can be drawn up on that basis.
Fire protection engineers are the people in charge of designing fire safety equipment for buildings, while architects are responsible for fire prevention equipment and fire escapes. For a building permit to be issued, all the drawings and specifications for the building must first be examined and approved by government departments that have authority over the construction industry and before construction begins, the building’s fire prevention and escape plans have to be checked by fire departments. In many developed countries, structural fire prevention, fire compartments (for containment of fire), firefighting equipment, fire-related safety equipment and interior design are reviewed altogether and these various aspects are allowed to compensate for one another to some extent.
In contrast, under Taiwan’s current system, each of these aspects has to be designed and inspected in conformity with a separate set of regulations. This often leads to over-design, which drives up construction costs. It is neither an economical or efficient way of going about things.
Article 7 of the Fire Services Act (消防法) stipulates that fire protection equipment engineers should design and supervise construction of fire safety equipment and that fire protection equipment engineers or technicians should be responsible for its installation and maintenance. However, a law meant to regulate fire protection equipment engineers and technicians that was proposed 16 years ago has still not been enacted, so a system to govern the profession has not been fully established. As a result, some fire prevention projects are supervised and certified only in name, not in practice. In many cases, changes are made to internal partitions and decorations during the course of construction and areas are made bigger or smaller. Such changes may compromise fire safety and escape routes, but sometimes there is no way of reviewing and adjusting them. Sometimes only the quantity of the equipment, as stipulated in relevant laws, is considered, without making a new inspection to determine the effectiveness of the fire prevention design as a whole. Such an approach may result in “improvements” that not only add to the cost of alterations, but actually compromise safety when the equipment is actually used.
Article 9 of the Fire Services Act says that the administrator of any place required to provide fire safety equipment should contract a fire protection equipment engineer or technician to service it periodically. Additionally, the Building Act (建築法) lays out rules about public safety inspections, licensing and reporting of buildings. These rules concern the regular inspection of fire prevention and escape equipment, elevators and escalators, lightning conductors, emergency electricity supply systems, special electricity supply, ventilation and air conditioning ducts, gas-burning equipment, etc. The two kinds of inspection are done according to different laws and the items that have to be reported are also different, but how many ordinary people really understand the difference between them?
It is not hard to understand why people are asking how a building can meet safety standards yet still not be guaranteed safe. Why do those responsible for enforcing the laws on the ground find themselves in the predicament of knowing full well that a place is full of danger, but are not able to do anything about it? The problem is that many such old buildings really do meet the conditions laid out in fire-related laws and regulations.
Article 12 of the Standards for Installation of Fire Safety Equipment Based on Use and Occupancy divides places into six usage and occupation classes. Pubs and bars like the ALA Pub come under Class A, as do dancehalls, nightclubs, beauty parlors, video and karaoke clubs, video game arcades, hotels, shops, markets, restaurants, nursing and old people’s homes, creches, saunas and more. Applications are often made to set up such establishments in existing buildings. In the case of older buildings, laws and regulations that were in force at the time when their building permits were issued only required that they have one direct staircase. Their corridors, fire compartments, fire doors and fire escapes usually don’t meet the standards laid out in current laws and regulations. Besides, many such establishments are smaller than the minimum size for which the law requires automatic sprinkler systems to be installed.
In view of this, the government should review existing fire safety laws and regulations as they relate to Class A establishments that are located in older buildings and consider whether these laws and regulations need to be amended. When it comes to places whose fire prevention equipment and fire escapes cannot be improved, owners should be compelled to install suitable fire safety equipment, such as standalone smoke alarms and simple sprinkler systems, and such places should be on the priority list for inspection by the fire brigade. Taiwan’s existing formulistic laws and regulations, as well as the separation between the architectural and fire safety inspection and approval processes, put Taiwan far behind international trends and out of step with the needs of society. It is high time for Taiwan to establish a comprehensive set of laws and a truly functional safety inspection system.
Ho Yu-tsung is chairman of the Union of Chinese Fire Protection Engineers’ Associations.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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