Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The Kobe-Hanshin Earthquake was the world-first seismic disaster with about 6,050 victims and 40 group fires basically caused by the collapse of about 46,000 low-rise and 3,000 middle or high rise buildings, which occurred in the midst of modern technological urban areas. Destroyed highway and jammed up main roads made supporting fire engines unable to access fire sites. City fire hydrants were almost ineffective, because their piping system was broken. This paper shows the outline of fire disasters and implements a concept on the limitation of group fire by constructing urban fire compartment. The author indicates the compartmentation must be mostly composed of improved aged-houses and buildings, because remodeling of inhabited district is quite hard, and the results of investigations warned that highly damaged fire equipments and facilities revealed the fire safety of building itself quite serious in a large earthquake. Through various studies, several important countermeasures are proposed in this paper.