Tuesday, Jan 05, 2010
Gulf News
Dubai The world's tallest building — featuring more than 150 available floors and expecting to hold up to 35,000 people at any one time — presents a certain risk hazard. When it comes to emergency evacuation, structure and operations is everything.
The highest-risk part of the Burj Khalifa is its high speed elevators.
To assist in the evacuation of occupants, designated elevators feature a "lifeboat evacuation" mode, allowing fire brigade personnel or trained staff to transport occupants from upper portions of the tower to designated discharge levels.
The elevators include full operating capability on both primary and emergency power, water resistant equipment, means for visual inspection of the elevator shaft and raised elevator door thresholds on each floor opening to minimise the flow of sprinkler water into the shafts. There is also a 5,500kg capacity elevator for firefighters and building service work. For those who choose to take the stairs during evacuation, highly fire resistant concrete walls surround all stairs.
Refuge areas
"People cannot be expected to walk down 160 floors, so there are pressurised air-conditioned refuge areas, approximately every 25 floors where they could wait safely or rest on the way down," said Eric Tomich, an architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill the American firm that designed the building.
The areas of refuge are separated from the main structure of the building by a two-hour fire resistant construction and are pressurised to minimise the migration of smoke into the compartment.
While the Burj's design is based on a defend-in-place strategy, where the structure is geared towards isolating the problem and protecting the residents within, there is a possibility that an escalated event may require a full building evacuation. To ensure safety, the Burj Khalifa features a home automation system which consists of LCD panels that display detailed emergency information to specified groups of building occupants. These displays can be found dotted around in key locations such as individual residential units and areas of refuge.
Multi-alarm sensors that include smoke, heat and optical sensors are located in all rooms throughout the building. In emergency situations such as during a fire, the system will immediately notify occupants in the area through an emergency voice/alarm communication system in both Arabic and English.
Fire safety systems
The main fire safety systems installed within the Burj Khalifa are the fire alarm and sprinkler systems and smoke evacuation systems. The length of the building, from basement to level 160 is fully sprinkler-fed.
On the building management and operations side, crisis response plans in place in the tower have been developed using the guidelines outlined with the National Fire Protection Association's (NFPA) disaster/emergency management and business continuity programmes and NFPA's recommended rractice for pre-incident planning.
A Crisis Command Team which also doubles up as the Facilities Management Team has been trained to manage the response efforts of building staff during a crisis.
"There will be offices located everywhere around the perimeter of the building. A team, which will be onsite 24 hours a day, seven days a week have been trained and briefed on what to do in all situations whether it's a fire, earth quake, sandstorm etc," said Bassel Mehio, fire protection consultant at Rolf Jensen and Associates.
By Aya Lowe
Gulf News 2010. All rights reserved.
