The Forsyth Barr Stadium
has been given a pass mark and building consent for its fire
safety.
Dunedin City Council chief building control officer Neil
McLeod said a peer-reviewed fire design for the stadium had
been completed as part of between 40 and 50 building consents
issued so far for the stadium.
There were three main aspects to fire safety in buildings:
allowing people to exit the building safely in the event of a
fire; allowing the Fire Service to rescue people; and making
sure any fire did not spread to other buildings.
The design included sprinkler systems and smoke alarms, and
"various other control systems", he said.
One major aspect of safety was in-built redundancy in the
width of the exit spaces, meaning they were built wider than
they would need to be under normal circumstances.
"That's a common theme with most fire designs," he said,
including at buildings like Sammy's, a venue that was ordered
to close in March, after fire safety fears were raised, and
re-opened shortly after.
"The exit widths determine how many people can go in a
building," Mr McLeod said.
Buildings with steel-sheet roofs, like the Warehouse, Mitre
10 and Bunnings buildings in South Dunedin, had "plastic
inserts" that both allowed light in, and would disintegrate
in the event of a fire.
"This building [the stadium] is quite different," Mr McLeod
said.
There was already "quite a lot of cross-flow ventilation"
from openings in the stadium, which would allow heat and
smoke to escape.
Auckland-based fire engineer Ed Claridge said the Fire
Service had a role under the Building Act to review the
design for the stadium, and provide stakeholder advice during
the design stage, which Mr Claridge was involved in.
He said ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) was a "fairly
interesting material", and was being used as external
cladding on Eden Park's south stand.
Asked if it was safe, he said "from a Fire Service
perspective, it is".
Because the material was so thin, and "disappeared" quickly
when burned, it allowed heat and smoke to escape.
One way of dealing with smoke being trapped in a building
with an ETFE roof, as the stadium will have, was to have a
"heat zip" across the material, that would heat up and burn
away the material in the event of a fire, providing an
opening.
That system, though, had not been used in New Zealand.
- david.loughrey@odt.co.nz
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