I see fire pumps and tanks far too often in the center of large structures down in the sub-basement.
Sometimes the fire protection engineer in charge is a whiz-bang Computational Fluid Dynamic simulation artist, but has a disdain for the sprikler vein of the business. It can be hard to convince an engineer who has used a computer to validate smoke dampers for much of their career, that bricks and mortar work offer better fire protection than MS Windows activated smoke curtains. But this is ofen the mentality of the engineer who is chosen to represent fire protection at the upfront meetings. Worse still is a fire protection professional will not even be invited to the pre-FEED table. Often the civil or mechanical engineer at pre-FEED locates the fire pump in close to dead-center of the building, for what is a good reason to their thinking: reduced hydraulic demand to remote areas. But what they don't consider is in the 1 in 300+ year building fire is: 1. fire department using the fire pump room during live fire operations 2. the water tank is next to these sub basement fire pumps, virtually assuring wet or leaky conditions years on 3. maintenance and repair suggests someone will have to take the pump out, and a new pump in, piece by piece. 4. if there is a fire in the basement, it has chance to contaminate the air consumed by the pump's diesel motor Many of these buildings are large enough that if they simply put the tank at grade, they would have enough pressure in the basements from gravity to operate the first half dozen sprinklers, in the event of fire pump failure. Fire protection, being a cost item, requires fine diplomatic and negotiating skills to optimize our systems. Many jurisdictions have different tolerances to fire risk than held by North Americans, and to their credit, these other jurisdictions are much more realistic about accepting 1 in 300+ year building fire. Each situation deserves its own evaluation. But I have yet to find an occassion justifying spending 300+k$ on two fire pumps and a tank, only to install them at the sub-basement of a building. Thank you all for the excellent discussion and references to OSHA, NFPA 13 and NFPA 20 on this subject. Scot Deal Excelsior Fire/Risk Engineering gsm: + 420 722 141 478 _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/listinfo.cgi/sprinklerforum-firesprinkler.org
