Intelligent Building Response.
Intelligent Building Response.
(4871 K)
Davis, W. D.
Fire Protection Engineering, No. 33, 26,30,32,34,36,
Winter 2007.
Keywords:
emergencies; first responders; fire fighters; decision
making; building management; information dissemination;
fire fighting; dispatch
Abstract:
In the event of a building emergency, fire, police and
other emergency personnel who arrive at the event are
faced with the need to quickly appraise the situation.
The task of sizing up the emergency and determining the
best way of dealing with it typically requires both an
inspection of the building perimeter and entering the
building to obtain information from the fire alarm panel
and other equipment panels. These activities can require
a considerable amount of time, particularly if the
building is large. Why should first responders need to
do a size-up at the scene in order to find out what is
happening inside? Real-time information regarding
building systems should be available while they are
enroute to the scene. Why can't a dispatcher understand
the emergency inside the building from the start of an
incident, even before the apparatus is dispatched? A
modern building fire system has fire sensors in every
room that report alarms to a fire panel when the smoke
level or temperature reaches a set threshold. These same
sensor signals could be processed by a computer to
identify growth and progress of a fire and identify
hazardous conditions throughout the building. That
information could be made available to the incident
commander before he/she arrives on scene.
Building and Fire Research Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899