This report examines structure fires in British Columbia (BC) that occurred over a thirteen year period to explore variations in outcomes as a function of building height and life safety systems. The study outlines the data definitions that were used to identify the relevant subset of fires that occurred in the province during this time period.
The purpose of this study is to describe firefighter injuries and deaths in structure-related fires and to investigate the underlying connection between building properties, including fire safety measures, and their effects on the risk to firefighters responding to a fire event. For the first time, comprehensive fire-related data across Canada is available in the form of the National Fire Information
With routine changes to building codes, the use of educational campaigns, and the technological advancements associated with smoke and fire detectors and alarms, it is much more common nowadays for homes to have functioning smoke and fire detectors, alarms, and suppression systems. However, this was not always the case for homes built decades ago. Given this, this research note focuses
This report examines 42,701 residential1 fire incidents reported to the British Columbia (BC) Office of the Fire Commissioner (OFC) between 1988 and 2015, inclusive (22.4% of the 190,564 fire incidents reported over this time). The high-level purpose of this analysis was to examine the significance of the method of fire control and fire safety systems on the fire outcomes (with
This report examines British Columbia (BC) building fires as a function of the general construction type. The fires that are examined were reported to the BC Office of the Fire Commissioner (OFC) between October 20, 2008 and October 19, 2013. The data included in this analysis was provided by 339 reporting agencies across the province, sampled from First Nations band
The purpose of this study was to examine fire-related casualties, fire outcomes, and casualty behaviour for fires that occurred in residential properties, and to compare fires that occurred in buildings completely protected by sprinkler systems with those fires that occurred in buildings without any sprinkler protection.
This paper summarizes the findings from an evaluation of the historical fire protection performance of sprinkler systems in multi-level residential buildings in British Columbia (BC), with the intent of anticipating how the fire safety systems should perform in six-storey mid-rise wood-frame buildings, permitted in BC since 2009.
A large-scale fire demonstration was conducted to observe and validate the fire safety performance of a cross-laminated timber stair-elevator shaft as an alternative solution to a shaft of noncombustible construction for the now-completed 13-storey residential mass timber building project – Origine in Quebec City. The results demonstrated that the severe, high-intensity fast growing fire in the adjacent apartment had no
This Canadian Wood Council (CWC) publication was developed to assist designers in applying the fire safety requirements of the National Building Code of Canada for all buildings. This is a companion, explanatory document to the NBCC. Fire Safety Design in Buildings complements the Wood Design Manual, Wood Reference Handbook and other CWC publications, providing a comprehensive family of reference material
