16th November 1999

Email this Page |

Legislation introduced to Northern Ireland in the New Year is expected to put a greater onus on the business and industrial community and on the public sector to help prevent the outbreak of fires in their buildings.

The Director of the province's Fire Safety Engineering Research Centre, which is run by the University of Ulster, is Professor Jim Shields:

"Workplace regulations will put the emphasis on the owner/occupiers of buildings to do the risk assessment for fire. This is an important development," he said.

Staff at the Centre, which is based on the old Courtaulds site in Carrickfergus, are already gearing themselves up to help underpin the new legislation

The Centre, which has upwards of twenty staff, is the largest in Ireland for research into fire and its causes. In recent years it has won more than £2 million pounds in grants to carry out such work.

That work has brought with it an impressive international reputation among those involved in fire safety nationally and internationally: its most recent appointment is the former Head of the Fire Safety Institute in Moscow, Professor Valimider Molkav.

However, Professor Shields and his team say they are already aware of many of the issues the new regulations will raise in Northern Ireland. The Centre is consulted regularly by organisations in both the public and private sectors in the province:

"Buildings are becoming increasingly complex in their construction. We give advice on matters of design from a fire safety point of view and carry out tests to see how different products and materials respond in a fire.

The Centre also carries out a series of courses from Masters degrees and Diplomas to short courses to help those in the management of buildings, such as local hospitals, deal with the issue of fire:

"Fires must be managed by people who understand them. We introduce people on the course to real fire and show them the need for immediate and appropriate action. This can range from the use of fire extinguishers to appraising and training staff to help deal in such an emergency," he explained.

Indeed the Centre has also been involved in extensive research into how people behave in fire and has carried out a number alerts in major stores throughout the province.

Professor Shields has been researching fire for more than 25 years, continually trying to increase his understand of it:

"No two fires are alike. There can be any number of different possible fire scenarios: Fire is like a Rubric Cube: you move of piece of the equation and everything else changes.

"Much of what we do here is about reducing the human and financial cost of fires and about finding ways of buying time to get people to safety."

He is very clear about the single most common cause of fire. Hundreds of millions of fires are lit each week in work and at home but only some of them cause problems. Those problems can almost always be traced to carelessness.

In industry maybe someone has not serviced a piece of equipment properly nor has highly flammable material too close to an ignition source. At home they may have left some kitchen or other appliance switched on, for example.

Professor Shields says the answer is to continue to try and change people's behaviour. He has praised local and national community fire safety programmes but insists there is much more to do:

"Prevention must have primacy. Smoke detectors have helped reduce the numbers of deaths in fires but ironically the number of casulities appear to have gone up. We have to look at that and the changing patterns of home occupancy- people seem to be using candles more than ever, for example."

For further information, please contact:

Press Office Department of Communication and Development
Telephone: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk