Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The growing volume of research on fire risk has yet to produce convergence on the meaning of the term "fire risk" or on closely related concepts like "scenario" and "fire hazard". These differences in terminology are not simply semantic but often reflect either disagreements or confusion over the essential elements of fire risk analysis. This paper presents a number of basic concepts and a very general format for fire risk measures and models. Then the elements of these concepts are discussed to underline key distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate designs for fire risk analysis. The principal theme is the need to define a model to capture all the variations in fire conditions and other conditions that can affect the fire involvement of the subject of interest, whatever it may be.