{"id":4528,"date":"2023-05-16T21:46:43","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T09:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=4528"},"modified":"2023-05-16T21:46:43","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T09:46:43","slug":"loafers-lodge-fire-engineer-wants-safety-rules-revamped-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=4528","title":{"rendered":"Loafers Lodge fire: Engineer wants safety rules revamped"},"content":{"rendered":"

A fire engineer who has studied boarding house risks says the safety rules are too slack and need tightening.<\/p>\n

Multiple people\u00a0have been killed in a fire<\/a>\u00a0that swept the 92-room Loafers Lodge in Newtown, in Wellington early today.<\/p>\n

Dr Geoff Thomas’s\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0in 2014 found multi-unit buildings without sprinklers have the highest fire casualty rates.<\/p>\n

“There’s inconsistency in the treatment of fire safety,” Thomas told\u00a0Nine to Noon\u00a0<\/i>today.<\/p>\n

For transient accommodation “the risk is not dealt with very well”.<\/p>\n

“The rate of fire fatalities was about twice that for residential houses, but if it was unsprinklered it was four times that,” he said.<\/p>\n

The old age of many transient accommodation blocks or houses was another weak spot.<\/p>\n

“If you look at any disaster, typically, a number of things have to go wrong.<\/p>\n

“And quite often in older buildings or facilities, then you might have a fire safety feature that was already compromised. So rather than have say three or four things go wrong to create a tragedy, you may only have one or two.”<\/p>\n

He conducted the research when he was at Victoria University, when he realised the residential fire safety requirements were low.<\/p>\n

Anywhere people slept raised the risk, as the sense of smell closed down when a person slept, he said.<\/p>\n

If alarms did not work –\u00a0as has been reported at Loafers Lodge by residents<\/a>\u00a0– a person might not wake up in time.<\/p>\n

Ironically, shopping malls and office blocks, where no one sleeps, had a lot of protections, like mandatory sprinklers, as they were judged to be high hazard due to being crowded, he said.<\/p>\n

The fire rules demanded sprinklers for anything over 25 metres tall, but not below that if a building had two stairwells, or one stairwell below 10m high.<\/p>\n

What was needed in the first place was enforcement of the current rules around alarms and exits, Thomas said.<\/p>\n

The research covered buildings all over the country and also drew on coronial data.<\/p>\n

Source RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fire engineer who has studied boarding house risks says the safety rules are too slack and need tightening. Multiple people\u00a0have been killed in a fire\u00a0that swept the 92-room Loafers Lodge in Newtown, in Wellington early today. Dr Geoff Thomas’s\u00a0research\u00a0in 2014 found multi-unit buildings without sprinklers have the highest fire casualty rates. “There’s inconsistency in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4530,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions\/4530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}