Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Safety measures in a building based on average fire severity and average fire resistance are likely to be less efficient than measures based on extreme values of these two factors. What is ideally required is a minimum fire resistance to cope with the maximum fire severity likely to be reached in a building. The costs and benefits involved in such a degree of safety can be evaluated later. This Note, however, is concerned only with the fire resistance of a structural element. The statistical properties of the minimum fire resistance could be studied with the aid of data from a small number of tests. Such an analysis would require, the application of the theory of extreme values as illustrated in the example.