Status of the fire safety guidelines

What the guidelines are

The fire safety technical guidelines are documents that provide solutions for meeting the requirements set out in the fire regulation. They are publicly available for download on the website of the national disaster management directorate.

There are currently around a dozen guidelines, covering among other things protection against fire spread, evacuation, heat and smoke control, the fire characteristics of building structures, computer simulation, risk classification and the fire safety compliance handbook.

Voluntary application, presumed compliance

This is the key sentence: applying a guideline is voluntary, and where it is applied the solution is presumed to meet the corresponding requirement of the regulation and to achieve the expected level of safety.

Two things follow.

For those who follow them

There is no need to prove separately that the solution is good — the presumption is in your favour. In practice this significantly simplifies permitting and handover.

For those who depart from them

Departure is allowed, but then you have to demonstrate that the same level of safety is achieved another way — typically by calculation, testing or simulation. This is not forbidden, just more work and more responsibility.

Why this has to be understood precisely

Two opposite errors circulate in the profession.

One is that “the guideline is not legislation, so it can be ignored”. Formally true, practically misleading: departure requires demonstration, which costs resources.

The other is that “the guideline is mandatory”. That is not true either, and it is harmful because it shuts out engineering-verified, often better solutions — including exactly the ones this technology needs.

They change

The guidelines are revised regularly, and revised versions are generally applicable from a stated date. So for any fire safety solution it must be recorded which version it was based on — years later that will be the question.

The point

A guideline is not an order but an easing of the burden of proof. Following it is simpler; departing from it is allowed, but only with demonstration.