Abhishek Chhabra
Market Development Manager, Thomas Bell-Wright International Consultants, Dubai
When people in India started writing the building codes around 6th century AD (Vastu Shastras) the options on methodologies of construction and materials were very limited and the behavior of people was fairly predictable. Not anymore! Nowadays the complexity and variables affecting construction have been changing very quickly, and unfortunately, the laws and rules (building codes) which define minimum requirements take several years to change. This lag is a systemic challenge and is world-wide. But certain key guides that have been published by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) continue to help define quality and safety across all industries while the laws catch-up – whether it is electrical safety, industrial products, food, pharma or inspections inside factories, construction sites or hospitals. These guides provide the much-needed unbiased language to help procure and deliver products and services in a fast-changing world. Let us understand how to use these to ensure fire safety too.
Any procurement needs an unbiased system that brings about the basic assurance needed for any transaction – ‘getting what you want.’ With so many fire accidents happening in India (and the world), everyone wants these fires not to threaten life, and avoid property damage. This note suggests simple ways to implement actionable steps that can be added to technical specifications and commercial clauses across contracts to ensure fire safety, thus safeguarding investments and ensuring minimum damage to life and property in case of a fire incident.
Who are the stakeholders?
For the construction industry, the image #01 defines some key stakeholders who need to enter into commercial contracts (to get what they want) with each other. The key language used to define expectations is often a specification document. Now defining fire safety and its implementation often slips out due to lack of awareness to ask ‘exactly’ what is needed.
These stakeholders get involved directly or indirectly in design, build and maintain. Image #02 defines some key steps that ensure the learnings from past mistakes (captured in building codes and other guidance documents) are avoided. The tricky part is implementing these concepts with the limitations of time, money, availability of correct products or materials, and lack of training, awareness and comprehension of implementation. A better understanding and usage of the referred ISO guides makes it easy to design, build and maintain. A common thread across these steps is procurement of materials and repeatability of installation. Getting commercial and technical language to align across the contracts of stakeholders makes it easy to assure the delivery of what is designed.
Simplifying procurement: Materials & installation for fire safety
Before we read on, we should know the real difference between voluntary and mandatory.
Making anything mandatory requires a law to be enacted – this requires a consensus. Such laws require technical documents (like building codes) to be referred to as well. And these technical documents also require a consensus. Here lies the risk due to the lag which is well known. A lot of construction gets finished while/ before these two consensuses are arrived at. Hence large hotels chains, hospitals, commercial and retail establishments and insurers and reinsurers never rely on just the minimum mandatory requirements in any given geography. They understand that the rate at which building materials and construction methodologies are evolving; reliance on the minimum mandatory is a high risk, and it will lead to a loss of reputation, money and of course life and property. So, it is common practice to use more evolved and adopted building codes and even more. Hence the technical specifications need to be current and updated, and these are implemented using advanced conformity assessment mechanisms for increased assurance. Conformity assessment is all the activities completed to determine if a product or service meets specific requirements.
Let us read how conformity assessment mechanisms are jointly defined by the experts from 165 countries (including India). These experts form and define the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and define these conformity assessment mechanisms. May of these standards have been helping government bodies as well as large investors and specification writers on ways to assess and define ‘getting what you want.’ See image #03 which gives an overview of the terms and definitions used by ISO’s Committee on Conformity Assessment (CASCO). Below are the three standards whose references should be utilized effectively for procurement. These three are also used to describe a case study in this article.
- ISO/ IEC 17025: General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories.
- ISO/ IEC 17065: Conformity assessment requirements for bodies certifying products, processes and services.
- ISO/ IEC 17020: Conformity assessment requirements for the operation of various types of bodies performing inspection.
Understanding simple steps with a case study
A 300 room 5-star luxury hotel in Dubai would cost around AED 300-400 Million (INR 600-800 Crore) to be built. The MEP works which is about 35% of this cost (INR 250 Crore) has a key element to create compartmentalization for ensuring fire safety. Compartmentalisation or to create a compartment of the area where fire gets initiated helps ensure that a fire that is contained for 2 or 3 hours at a given location giving enough time for evacuation and rescue. This is created using fire doors, partition walls, as well as thorough penetrations and other mechanisms which help seal the openings for pipes and utilities.
If the specifications or implementation for this fire safety plan is weak or done incorrectly, the property may have a big fire and would be closed for about a year at the least. So, when re-negotiating with suppliers and contractors to save money here, it should well be kept in mind that what an impact such a savings could lead to – the impact of a small fire versus a huge fire!
Without factoring cost of land, the earnings of such a property (after removing operators’ expenses, the earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) are estimated to be about INR 50 Crore a year. In case of a fire which could be contained in a room, now turns into a massive accident and possible loss of lives and property. And of course the losses of missed earnings, damage of reputation, etc. In India, this closure could be for many years. The maths here is easy. Let us understand the steps that can be put in place to increase the assurance and minimize such a loss.
Step I: Designing & specifying
To make sure the inherent fire safety (passive fire protection) function well, let us look at the relationship between building materials, designs and installation. A board or a door cannot really contain a fire in a compartment on its own. Alongwith ensuring the repeatability of production of a (fire rated) board or (fire rated) door, a similar assurance is needed for all the components, and verification of installation as per the design validated by a conformity mechanism.
Bear in mind that a fire test report is only an indication that a manufacturer and the installer have the capability to produce and install a door/ partition assembly that can contain a fire (for given number of hours). You may know that it is uncommon to read how the fire door or partition assembly was installed in a test lab. Also it is impossible to find out how these were really manufactured from the test report! So, for assurance of supply to the project site you need to rely on a certification and listing body (described more below). And of course, the certification body should be accredited by an independent accreditation body to certify based on ISO 17065. A self-accreditation is like saying that, “I am checking myself that my work is correct or not.”
On the same lines, the test reports used for certification or verification should come from a test lab which has been accredited by an independent accreditation body to test based on ISO 17025. Inspectors validating the installations at the site should have qualification and experience that has been ratified using ISO 17020 by an independent accreditation body. To avoid such a situation (where a product seller or a test lab or a certification body claims that they are good)referencing these ISO standards correctly in specifications is critical.
Step II: Understanding certification & listing
If a building material or a system is getting ready for a fire test, it should be known that a fire test will happen on a given sample/ assembly. This is very different from measuring the weight of a commodity on a weighing scale or flow rate in a pipe or a wire. Hence when the lives of people and property are at stake, a better understanding and implementation of the assurance system is important. See the table 1 (Copyright ISO) from ISO 17067 guide in image #04. This is used by ISO 17065 (for certification) in defining different types of certification & listing mechanisms that are used to increase assurance. Many certification bodies have programs that follow a very stringent mechanism (type 5 or higher) to provide high levels of assurance. As an example, the fire & life safety code in UAE published by the Civil Defense mandates product conformity as per Type 5 of this table in the building code. Large contracts, insurance companies and procurement specifications often use reference to these standards in defining unbiased mechanisms to get high levels of assurance to great detail.
of certification programs (Copyright ISO)
Image #05 shows a typical block-diagram to explain the working of one such certification & listing assurance process.
Step III: Verification and maintenance of what is procured
Unlike procurement of consumer products where rights of consumers are protected by certain laws, business to business (B2B) procurement calls for everything to be specified in great details. Ensuring fire safety with so many different stakeholders (who all have different commercial motivations) needs a robust system for increased assurance. Luckily there are already proven mechanism followed around the world to implement this. After implementing assurance of materials via a stringent certification and listing process, the ISO 17020 provides the language to ensure that installations can demonstrate repeatability.
We started with clearly defining an implementable design using published guides (Building Codes) and ensured that the specifications use correct references to enable assurance of materials procured and installations inspected.
The image #06 describes these three steps to explain assurance of fire rated doors (and even other systems). The procurement specifications are created when the fire safety plan is created. As an example, a list of fire doors with their design configurations as well as ratings in hours is released.
Here, the specifications need to clearly define certification & listing as per procurement criteria. Next, when the contractors are using these specifications, they need to understand how certification can be verified (using listing directories like www.tbwcert. com). Procurement submittal needs to be cross-verified, and then when the procured fire doors arrive at the site, step 3 becomes critical. Traceability evidence like the certification labels should be verifiable. Often the online certification directories will contain drawings, addresses of suppliers as well as traceability verifiers like labels. Installation needs to be inspected to avoid voiding any warranties and to ensure that the money spent to design is not wasted by ensuring a validation and verification.
In conclusion, stringent verification processes for the procurement of materials as well as affirmation of installation are easy to demand for. Not only are these ISO standards adopted by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and are available to buy locally, even certification and listing is now available to Indian Standards and the construction industry can specify the new Indian Standards. Following are some of the Indian Standards published by BIS which help enable better fire safety.
- IS 3614-2: fire doors.
- IS 16947: Fire resistance tests for doors with glass panes, openable glass windows and sliding glass doors.
- IS 16945: Fire resistance test for glass walls.
- IS/ ISO 834-1: Fire-resistance tests elements – general requirements.
- IS/ ISO 834-4: Fire-resistance tests elements – load bearing vertical separating elements.
- IS/ ISO 834-5: Fire-resistance tests elements – load bearing horizontal separating elements.
- IS/ ISO 834-6: Fire-resistance tests – elements: beams
- IS/ ISO 834-7: Fire-resistance tests – elements: columns.
- IS/ ISO 834-8: Fire-resistance tests – elements: non-load bearing vertical separating elements.
- IS/ ISO 834-9: Fire-resistance tests – elements: non-load bearing ceiling elements.
