Water for fighting large structural and industry fires: a South African study

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to determine if the minimum fire flows in the National Standard (the SANS 10090) and the National Guideline (The Red Book) are adequate for fighting large Structural and Industry fires in South Africa. To this end, fire incidents, totalling 4 643 records from the City of Johannesburg, spanning 2003 to 2017, were collated, filtered, analysed and compared with previous studies, the SANS 10090 and The Red Book. The final dataset comprised 89 fire incidents. Study highlights include: 60% of the large fires were extinguished between 30 and 120 minutes; the average volume of water employed to extinguish the large fires was 9.63 kl; and all 89 fire flows were less than the minimum fire flows for the lowest fire risk categories. This study therefore validates previous studies that recommended revision of fire flows in the SANS 10090 and The Red Book.

KEYWORDS:

• Water for firefighting
• large fires
• firefighting standards and guidelines

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to personnel at the City of Johannesburg’s Emergency Management Services for the data provided and their willing participation in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics clearance

Ethics Clearance for the collection of data from the City of Johannesburg Emergency Management Services (EMS) and to present the research to EMS personnel was obtained from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Ethics Committee. Ethics Clearance Certificate Number is: CEECC- (543,310-17)

Notes

1. On the 10^th of October 2009, 1 South African Rand was equivalent to 0.1351 United States Dollar (Exchange Rates UK, 2021).