FiSEC offer a comprehensive range of specialist services to aid the design of buildings and structures in order to meet the complex fire legislation that is outlined within both national and local Acts.
We have considerable practical experience of a wide variety of building types, including shopping centres, hotels, leisure, residential, educational, judicial, commercial, industrial and storage buildings. This is in addition to our experience in resolving fire design problems associated with special or unusual structures.
Recent disasters have highlighted the importance of fire safety design and management in public buildings. Fire safety engineering design is increasingly recognised within the United Kingdom and overseas as an essential component of building design.
National codes and guidance, as in England and Wales, no longer rely on a traditional prescriptive approach to fire safety. In other countries the prescriptive approach can also be unsuitable for unique building types.
A variety of tools, techniques and devices may be used as components of an overall fire safety strategy these include, internal sub-division, sprinkler protection, smoke management, escape route design and fire safety management. These can either be considered as individual components and designed or calculated to meet a generally established set of performance standards, or integrated as part of a coordinated overall approach, accommodating a greater range of performance and more flexibility. The overall approach can enable the performance of individual components to be tuned to the nature and form of the building or structure under consideration. FiSEC can handle either approach.
FiSEC is operated by a team of people who have been actively involved in the preparation of codes and legislation and therefore have a unique awareness not only of code requirements but also their objectives and the best methods for their practical implementation.
FiSEC are skilled in the preparation of strategic approaches to fire safety design and can assist the design team in achieving their overall design objectives by the preparation of documents suitable for consideration by representatives of building control authorities.
Our objective for each project can be summarised as follows:-
It is our view that fire safety design should complement other basic design objectives for a building or structure and should be integrated within them. FiSEC can assist in bringing together design objectives with safety objectives demanded by authorities.
We may advise our clients to carry out measures that go beyond basic compliance.
We will clearly differentiate, in both our advice and also any 'requirements' from third parties such as the fire brigade, between what we consider to be a legal requirement and what is advisory.
Each project handled by FiSEC will be personally coordinated by one of our directors who will be selected on their availability and special skills rather than their geographic proximity to the client.