City-Wide Fire Vulnerability Map of High-Rise Residential Buildings

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

One of the significant hazards in the event of a fire in high-rise residential
buildings in cities is the length of time taken to completely evacuate a large number
of occupants. On a city scale, it is important that a city’s fire and rescue services are
in place to minimize the consequences which can be incurred in any potential fire
incident. The paper presents the methodology and results of a study that evaluates
the city-wide vulnerability in high-rise residential building fires in the City of Istanbul,
Turkey. In the context of fire and rescue service arrival to burning buildings, a
high-rise building can be considered vulnerable if the fire and rescue service arrives at
the building site only after the expected completion of evacuation of the building,
thus unable to fulfill its intended purpose of saving the occupants. The study is based
on comparison of an agent-based evacuation model of safe escape times for 1167
high-rise residential buildings against their fire and rescue service arrival times estimated
using GPS data. This methodology can be used to inform the decision about
optimal locations of a city’s fire and rescue services. As an example, this study indicates
that adding a single new fire station in the City of Istanbul can improve its preparedness
for fire accidents by reducing the risk of its most vulnerable district by
more than 26%.
Original languageEnglish
JournalFire Technology
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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