Fire Safety
Institute

Fire Risk Indexing

For many situations where a quantitative fire safety evaluation is desirable, detailed fire risk assessment may not be cost-effective or appropriate. This could be the case where great sophistication is not required or where a large number of properties suggests a simple, standardized procedure. For example, the vast majority of existing buildings are not economically amenable to in-depth fire safety analysis. Fire risk indexing can provide a cost-effective means of fire safety evaluation that is sufficient in both utility and validity for a large proportion buildings and processes.

Fire risk indexing systems are simplified models of fire safety. They constitute various processes of analyzing and scoring hazard and other risk parameters to produce a rapid and simple estimate of relative fire risk. While detailed fire risk evaluations are not amenable to consideration of subjective fire safety attributes such as human behavior and attitudes, the structure of a risk index system facilitates quantification and inclusion of such factors.

Advantages of indexing systems include reduced cost, overcoming evaluation problems of inadequate data, eliminating need for safety factors, integration of qualitative attributes, and not least, transparency of decision making.

The Fire Safety Institute has been a leader in the development and promotion of fire risk indexing. This effort is documented in the SFPE handbook of Fire Protection Engineering, the new book Evaluation of Fire Safety, and numerous technical articles.

Under a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a branch of the US National Park Service, the Fire Safety Institute developed a fire risk index to evaluate fire safety in historic house museums, The process followed the technical approach as documented in two peer reviewed articles:

Kaplan, Marilyn E., and John M. Watts, Jr., “Development of a Prototypical Historic Building Fire Risk Index to Evaluate Fire Safety in Historic Buildings”, APT Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 2-3, 1999, pp. 49-54.

Watts, John M., Jr., and Marilyn E. Kaplan, “Fire Risk Index for Historic Buildings”, Fire Technology, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2001, pp. 165-178.