Designing fire safety into New Zealand buildings

In 2017, Fire and Emergency New Zealand became the country's first unified national firefighting organisation, superseding the New Zealand Fire Service to bring around 14,000 people and more than 40 separate bodies together.

As part of the unification process, we at Fire and Emergency aim to reduce risks for building occupants and firefighters alike. By improving fire engineering practice and strengthening safety legislation, we can fulfil our statutory function to provide fire prevention, reduction and suppression services. In doing so, we work with a wide range of stakeholder groups, at both a strategic and a tactical level.

The performance-based regime aims to ensure that buildings are constructed and maintained in a way that enables them to be used safely. It applies both to new buildings and to existing buildings that are being altered.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) regulates compliance, which is administered by building consent authorities (BCAs), predominantly local or regional councils. These authorities approve applications for building consent, inspect construction and, on completion, issue a code compliance certificate and compliance schedule.

We have developed a concept called the lifetime of a building, to ensure that all stakeholders have meaningful involvement at an early stage of the design process, and that they think beyond approval and compliance to consider building use and serviceability.

The concept identifies the main stages in the building life cycle – including design, construction, inspection, fire alarms and emergency calls, occupation, and refurbishment or replacement – and sets out how our organisation is involved in each.

For instance, at the design stage we follow the International Fire Engineering Guidelines 2005, which outline a best-practice approach to developing fire-safe and fit-for-purpose buildings.

We have also developed a range of online resources for each stage of the building lifetime, to inform designers and support construction industry stakeholders.

Through its involvement with the briefs for tall buildings – generally classified as those of 50 storeys or more, of which there are a growing number in Auckland – it became clear to Fire and Emergency's predecessor, the New Zealand Fire Service, that the legislative framework did not adequately address the safety of such structures.

As a consequence, the service worked with the MBIE to devise design guidelines for operational requirements. Published by the ministry as Practice Advisory 18 in 2016, these guidelines highlight specific considerations for the design of tall buildings to ensure they fulfil the fire safety performance requirements of the Building Code. This includes the way occupants are warned of a fire, how they are evacuated, and how firefighters can access the fire floor to perform rescue and firefighting operations.

To help standardise this process, we have developed a checklist of firefighting facilities, primarily for designers but also fire contractors. This document is supported by our Designers' Guide to Firefighting Operations.

These are both designed to help fire safety and fire protection engineers comply with building design requirements, and inform them about how Fire and Emergency is likely to undertake firefighting and rescue operations.

The guide covers many of the common issues we encounter in our emergency operations, and addresses questions that stakeholders often ask. These include issues such as water supply, access to sites, access to buildings, safety features for use by firefighters, and plans for evacuating occupants.

Internally, we also provide our operational personnel with a process map and associated guide. These give technical detail on the checklist, about which Fire and Emergency also offers online training.

Section 46 of the 2004 Act requires BCAs to provide a copy of consent documentation for certain building types – as listed in a New Zealand Gazette notice – to Fire and Emergency for design review.

Fire and Emergency also reviews and approves buildings' emergency management procedures and evacuation schemes, which building owners are required to develop under the 2018 regulations, to ensure they meet the regulatory requirements.

Of specific note is regulation 28, concerning evacuation to a place of safety within the building. This prescribes fire safety measures additional to those under the Building Code, and is designed to enable evacuation to a place of safety inside the building.

A landmark case regarding the Bankside apartments in Auckland highlighted the use of non-compliant design methodology. The challenge concerned the use of an open single staircase in an atrium, into which more than 100 apartments opened. The regulator determined that the design did not comply with the requirements for the safe evacuation of occupants.

This determination resulted in BCAs requiring far more rigour in the designs of buildings with single means of escape. It led to a series of further determinations, either pursued by BCAs themselves against other, non-compliant buildings, or resulting from appeals by developers over buildings that were not consented.

In a later determination, the regulator made a risk-based comparison of the design with a building of identical layout that complied with the prescriptive approach; that is, the acceptable solution.

However, while Australia has now decided to proceed with the adoption of such risk-based fire engineering in the next iteration of its own national building code, New Zealand regulators are deferring the introduction of this approach pending observation of the Australian example in practice.

Nevertheless, Fire and Emergency continues to work closely with industry and government stakeholders to provide fire engineering advice. Currently, we are developing an economic model to record the direct and indirect costs of fire to New Zealand's economy, to measure the effectiveness of mitigation strategies, as well as revisiting our code of practice on water supply for firefighting. This and our other work will ensure we keep communities across the country safe.