Why Risk Informed?

Fire safe design responsibility and implementation, which inherently involves risk-minimization and risk-based decision making, involves the interaction of many groups: Architects, facility and process designers, fire protection and safety engineers, loss control and risk managers; review and approval groups including building code officials, fire marshals, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies. This book describes a fire risk assessment process that can be understood, integrated, and adopted by all the above risk-based decision makers.

Having the "Risk‑Informed" dimension provides a path forward for situations where the application of prescriptive codes may not be feasible or cost-effective, where the application of performance‑based deterministic modeling to meet code equivalency has many uncertainties, or where there is a desire to conduct cost/benefit analysis of numerous fire protection alternatives.

Typical motivating factors for applying risk-informed methods can involve:

• 1. New construction projects where code requirements are hampering the design of innovative process facilities, structures, or new technology operations.
• 2. The need to develop fire risk reduction alternatives and cost/benefit analysis to comply with recommendations (which may not appear cost effective) made during fire inspection surveys, made by insurance companies, or from regulatory compliance audits.
• 3. Risk management concerns such as, "what are my biggest fire and explosion risks?" (risk‑informed information); given a fire, how well will the fire protection systems perform?" (performance‑based information); how do I optimize the available fire risk reduction budget?" (cost‑benefit analysis).
• 4. Third‑party liability potential such as off‑site risk to the public from a large fire or explosion incident.
• 5. Providing supplemental information for Performance-Based Design submittals.
• 6. Supplementing plant programs and assessments such as:
• [] capital improvement planning
• [] management of change
• [] fire system impairments or modifications
• [] risk-based inspection or maintenance
• [] risk-based operator training and emergency response planning
• [] facility siting risk evaluations

Typical benefits of integrating Risk-Informed, Performance-Based methods include

• 1. Ability to evaluate several different fire risk reduction strategies objectively
• 2. Ability to support cost-effective solutions for complex fire or explosion issues
• 3. Greatly facilitated communication among designers, managers, regulators
• 4. Increased management control over risk reduction strategies and expenditures
• 5. More consistent and objective decisions than those made intuitively and subjectively