A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FIRE RISK ASSESSMENT AND SAFETY MEASURES IN SOME MULTI-STOREY BUILDINGS OF LAHORE

Abstract

Many fire incidents happen in multi-storey buildings of Lahore that result in huge life, economic, environmental and infrastructure loss. The study is mainly carried out to undertake a fire risk assessment to determine fire risk and to analyze that into what extend selected multi-storey buildings are at risk. For fire risk assessment and checking the safety measures, surveys are made to four multi- storey buildings namely, Hafeez Center, Ali Tower, Century Tower and Garden Heights. The2se multi-storey buildings are selected because they have already experienced fire incidents. Random sampling technique is use to visually analyze the multi-storey buildings.  Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used for fire risk assessment by prioritizing criteria in form of weights using Saaty Scale (1-9). The relative importance of factors over one factor to another is obtained by comparing the factors with each other.  The length of the pairwise matrix is equivalent to the number of criteria used in decision making process. A 6×6 matrix is used having 6 criteria. These 6 criteria are selected by reviewing literature and by brainstorming. From AHP, we conclude that Century Tower is at high risk in comparison to other multi- storey buildings. The result obtained is that the early warning system, fire safety arrangements, area accessibility and building material in Ali Tower contributes equally about 17% of the fire risk, which gives higher risk in case of fire among all the factors. The Awareness of localities and structure of the building contribute 13% of the fire risk.