Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Starting from an analysis of the fire safety concept, this paper describes the scope, philosophy, methods and results of a radical fire safety research done by the Belgian School Building Fund in the larger framework of an overall school building research to meet the new requirements resulting from important educational evolutions . While covering three main groups of items : fire preventive, fire restrictive and fire protective measures, it stresses the need - to take the human behavior as a starting-point, - to pre-calculate the evacuation times from the design stage onwards, - to care for handicapped pupils in regular schools, - of particular safety concern in special schools and homes for disabled children, - to take safety arrangements for impaired visitors to the school as a community centre during off hours. The paper points to some near future developments in school life risks and responding measures. It is noteworthy that in 1982 the results of this research were translated into a national Belgian norm (NBN): S 21-204, that was given force of law by Royal Act. The conclusion says that we build schools in a much safer way than we live in them, owing to shortcomings in education itself, and thus ironically wonders why we should build schools