Safety in Case of Fire - The Effect of Changing Regulations

Abstract: In this doctoral thesis some fundamental problems concerning society's ability to control the safety in buildings in the case of fire by issuing performance-based building regulations are identified and analysed. Fire protection documentation from forty-six projects was studied, together with a detailed analysis of the Swedish building regulations and an extensive risk analysis of a class of buildings. The results show that there is a lack of regulation and guidance on how to perform verification, which leads to arbitrary design decisions. It can be questioned whether the approach taken by many practitioners today is sufficient to fulfil the requirements laid out in the building regulations, that is society's demand for fire safety. Few tools are available to address these issues in a practical way. This thesis presents a procedure for verification and suggests general quality demands for verification as a means of addressing these issues.