Bulletin of Japan Association for Fire Science and Engineering

The historical transition of structural fire safety requirement in Japan is introduced. And it is pointed out that the philosophy of risk management is empirically expressed in existing prescriptive code as different fire resistance requirements according to the number of stories. However, it is disappearing in current performance based verification method by requiring to use the same fire load regardless of the number of stories. To close the gap, this presentation introduces a quantitative method for the acceptable structural failure risk by treating the design fire load as authoritative good practice precautions. It is based on the distribution of the frequencies of fire load obtained by processing existing survey data. In addition to that, a correspondence relationship between design fire load and fire resistance time is also proposed by deriving assumed mass loss rate by the standard heating curve in Fire resistance test. These studies enable us to determine Risk-based design fire load density and required fire resistance time appropriate to the number of stories, and it compares with existing specification criterion.

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As regards evacuation safety of physically challenged people, legislations, standards, and other requirements in any form significantly vary from country to country. Against the backdrop of the enforcement of the so-called “Barrier-free New Law” adopted in 2006 in Japan, the accessibility of physically-impaired people has been notably improved. However, the reach of this law seems to only help the daily lives of the physically challenged population and falls short when faced with an emergency such as a fire or an earthquake. The purpose of this study is to perform a comparative analysis of different countries’ law enforcement of fire evacuation regulatory provisions for physically challenged people such as mobility impaired, elderly people, small children, and similar impaired individuals. The authors conducted a questionnaire survey on the requirements and the enforcement of fire evacuation regulatory provisions for these people in sixteen different countries. The results indicate that Japan is a country that is lagging far behind in safety regulations, while more stringent legal systems are established in many other surveyed countries. Since the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics games are scheduled to be held shortly in Tokyo, it is to be expected that improvements of the conditions for a barrier-free of safe evacuation for physically challenged people will be promptly implemented at the earliest possible date.

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