Civil Engineering March 2022 | Vol 30 No 2

Civil Engineering March 2022 61 whole is far from the standards of the de- veloping world and the trends in national statistics present a worrying picture, which is likely to be even worse if the national statistics were complete. Legislation, standards, regulating authorities and fire services Poor technical competency impacts the practical implementation of honouring the intention of the legislation that governs the fire safety infrastructure requirements. The Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Act and NBR form the legislative requirements in terms of the duties of deci- sion makers in terms of ensuring tenants, employees and the general public do not come to harm as a result of infrastructure development (private or public). The Code of Practice for the Application of the National Building Regulations provides a deemed-to-satisfy prescriptive approach in order to meet the requirements of the NBR, namely SANS 10400. Part T of the NBR deals directly with fire protection, and its corre- sponding Code of Practice is on Edition 4, with its latest edition dated 2020. 2 For design engineers, a long-time favoured approach to motivate lack of compliance to the deemed-to-satisfy requirements has been to quote a “rational design” which is defined as to quantita- tively demonstrate the satisfaction of the legislative requirements to equal or better the outcome’s strict adherence to the Code of Practice. The majority of these rational designs have been found wanting of this requirement, using equipment outside of limited approved applications, discounting risks without quantified cause and failing to effectively mitigate the risks as required by legislation. The increase in commercial and industrial losses further supports the recognition of this poor industry regulation. Furthermore, lack of fire safety regulation and infrastructure within informal housing settlements throughout South Africa has created an impossible environment for the requirements of our Constitution and safety legislation to be met for a large number of people. If we conservatively assume that in 2020 the number of informal households represents 20% of the total number of households, then informal households are almost four times more likely to experience a fire starting in them. Furthermore, incidents reported represent only the number of incidents reported, not the number of dwellings affected. In a single incident as many as 10 000 informal dwellers can be left homeless. 10 Hence, informal dwellers are one to two orders of magnitude more likely to lose their homes to fire than formal dwellers. This high probability of home loss for informal dwellers directly contradicts the level of safety implied by the NBR and the Constitution of South Africa, in that safe living conditions are not available to a significant proportion of our population. Municipalities have a mandate to provide fire departments to protect the inhabitants of the area in case of fire. The quality and level of resources of fire departments across the country varies significantly. The White Paper on the Fire Services published by the South African Government notes that “too many fire services especially from re- source poor municipalities are struggling to provide sustainable and cost-effective fire services. The number of lives lost and injuries sustained as a result of fires is alarming”. 11 The White Paper further notes that South Africa has one of the highest rates of death and disability related to fire in the world. Firefighters experience a range of constraints including being attacked by communities, lack of training, limited resources, delays in phone calls reaching the fire department (people call 10111 instead of 10177 or the local fire brigade directly), difficulties in finding fire sites, incomplete or missing structural informa- tion on record and much more. 12 All of these factors influence the efficiency and capacity of fire departments. Private and public fire safety The fire safety infrastructure utilised in the private sector ranges in quality and suitability. Many multinational institutions, banks, large IT companies and similar organisations have fire safety standards that exceed the requirements of the NBR, with equipment and personnel of a high standard. This is especially true when building insurers insist on protecting high-value assets. However, fire safety infrastructure for most com- mercial, residential and retail buildings will typically be based on national stand- ards and the quality of infrastructure will be heavily influenced by the competency of the fire engineers, architects and ap- proval authorities involved in the project, as well as the attitudes of the building owner/‌developer. Although industrial fires represent only a small number of the total number of fires in South Africa, they represent a disproportionately large portion of the value of total losses. Figure 5 presents the number of industrial losses and the estimated value of those losses. From the linear trendline it can be observed that there is an increase of around 15 incidents, or 1.7%, per year. However, of greater concern is the localised increases (e.g. 2012 and 2020) in the magnitude of the losses as this typically represents a small number of very high losses from large-scale disasters. Such low-probability-high-consequence events can have disproportionate effects on the country such as through insuf- ficient electricity supply, closing of export terminals, environmental disasters, explo- sions and even effects on supply chains or food security. Poor technical competency impacts the practical implementation of honouring the intention of the legislation that governs the fire safety infrastructure requirements. The Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Act and NBR form the legislative requirements in terms of the duties of decision makers in terms of ensuring tenants, employees and the general public do not come to harm as a result of infrastructure development (private or public). Municipalities have a mandate to provide fire departments to protect the inhabitants of the area in case of fire. The quality and level of resources of fire departments across the country varies significantly.