From this edition, the engineer Jaime Andrés Moncada joins VENTAS DE SEGURIDAD with a column in which he will talk about fire safety in the Latin American region.
By Jaime A. Moncada*
This is my first column on fire safety in this magazine and I am very excited about the opportunity that its editor, Santiago Jaramillo, has given me to explain, through this and future articles, what today is understood as fire safety in our Latin America.
I am a fire protection engineer who for more than 25 years has worked on projects of various kinds, in many parts of the world, doing my bit so that these buildings, power generation facilities, petrochemicals, warehouses and industries in general, have an acceptable level of fire safety.
But my area of greatest experience has been in projects in Latin America. My expectation is that through these lines I can offer a better understanding to the readers of this magazine on how to "understand" the world, the small but specialized world, of fire safety. In this first column, we will discuss where we are and how serious our fire safety problem is at the Latin American level.
Statistics
The director of NFPA's fire research and analysis department, Dr. John Hall, says that "good fire statistics are essential to establishing good fire safety policies." This should make us reflect on the fact that in the Latin American context there are no statistics on fires. The International Association for the Study of Economic Affairs on Insurance, known as The Geneva Association because it is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and which annually publishes the "World Report on Fire Statistics," does not include any statistics about Latin America.
Similarly, the International Technical Committee for Fire Prevention and Extinction or CTIF, with offices in Berlin and Paris, which analyzes fire statistics worldwide, has also not obtained basic information such as the number of deaths from fires or the cost of fires in any Latin American country. Although many Latin American fire departments have statistics, these, I understand, cannot be used internationally since they are not comparable with those of the rest of the world as they have not followed the statistical survey protocol pre-established by the aforementioned organizations.
The Difference of Our Problem with the U.S.: Unlike the United States, where there is a residential fire approximately every minute, in Latin America residences are safer because they are built mainly of low-combustible materials, such as brick and cement. From the residential point of view, it is valid to say that we are better off in Latin America than in the United States, a country where approximately 80% of fire deaths occur in the home. In the United States, fires in large industries and buildings do not cause a statistically significant number of deaths, and that is where we have to focus our attention since our reality is much more worrying.
It is precisely this type of architecture and industrial processes (industries and large buildings) that we are copying at increasingly accelerated paces and unfortunately, in many cases, we design, build and operate them without including the minimum requirements necessary to obtain acceptable fire protection.
Fires in Latin America: The terrible fires recently experienced in Asunción, Buenos Aires, Comayagua and Santa Maria suggest that our problem is focused on large buildings, whether they are sanitary, commercial, penitentiary, public meeting, high-rise buildings and industry occupations.
Surprising for many, since 2000 we have won in Latin America the sad distinction of having half of the fires with more than a hundred dead in the world (See box). Even so, in our region the vast majority of fires with multiple deaths or multimillion-dollar losses go unnoticed outside their place of origin and are generally not properly documented from the technical or regulatory point of view. Therefore, we are not learning from them. The renowned Spanish-American philosopher Jorge Santayana once said "those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
By way of illustration and as an example, in January 2013 there was a fire in a nightclub in Santa Maria, in southern Brazil, the Boate Kiss, where 242 people died. This was a fire with characteristics already known in the region: fireworks used by the band, combustible interior finishes, unacceptable evacuation routes, lack of automatic sprinkler systems and the overcrowded enclosure.
This fire occurs after a significant spate of similar fires in Latin America: Disco Cromagnón, Buenos Aires, December/04 194 dead; Disco La Guajira, Caracas, December/02, 47 dead; Disco Utopía, Lima, July/02, 29 dead; Disco Lobohombo, Mexico City, October/00, 20 dead; and Disco Factory, Quito, April/08, 19 dead. In this millennium alone, more than 550 dead in nightclubs not counting the dozens of other fires with few dead in nightclubs that have gone unnoticed by our radar, but all with a similar recipe.
What have we learned from these disasters? Have the protection conditions of discotheques in Latin America changed thanks to these fires?
The Cost of Fires
Many of these great fires have a very high cost to our society. Many sources in Venezuela have estimated the cost of rebuilding the East Tower of Central Park, following a devastating fire in a 56-story building in Caracas in October 2004, at US$250 million, which doesn't seem like much compared to the cost of New York's Twin Towers. estimated at about US$9.6 billion (property damage only).
What goes unnoticed is that the U.S. economy is 100 times larger than the Venezuelan economy, meaning that the direct monetary impact on the local economy is more than two and a half times higher in the Caracas incident than in the September 11 incident.
I am currently working on the documentation of several oil fires that have occurred recently and although I do not have exact figures, I believe that Latin America has 4 of the 10 most expensive recent fires worldwide. It's possible, but just no one knows.
What are we doing?
We must recognize that little by little, in our own way, we are finding consensus on what is the most appropriate solution to our fire safety problems. Most fire safety professionals, seeking excellence in their solutions have found that the best policy, the best guide, the most cost-efficient, is respecting the criteria established by the NFPA. There are also a growing number of countries that have found in NFPA regulations the most effective way to increase fire safety levels.
We must not forget that buildings, structures and fire protection systems that do not reach acceptable levels of fire protection affect everyone in our society. First of all, it affects the user who does not get acceptable safety in his installation despite having invested a lot of money in fire protection.
Insurance companies and local authorities also lose, as projects they inspect and/or insure may not find the minimum acceptable levels of self-protection. The manufacturer/installer loses because, in an environment with no set minimum levels of protection, competition between bidders becomes global price competition and, most likely, the winning proposal does not include enough equipment for the system to be truly effective.
Fire protection engineers also lose because it is difficult for them to compete with designers who have not studied our technology, nor understand the complexity of this type of engineering and who design what the client wants but not what he needs. Above all, ordinary citizens lose, who are exposed to a latent risk in their places of work, housing, recreation, study and visit.
From my point of view, there is an extensive and growing fire safety market in Latin America. It is amazing to think that thousands of works and projects include fire safety systems and the vast majority of these are done voluntarily. However, while there are many projects that include fire safety systems, most projects do not include them or include partial solutions, and that is why there is frustration in many. There is also frustration that many fire safety projects continue to be designed, installed and maintained by companies that are not trained to do so.
The short-term solution lies with the main stakeholder, the user of fire protection. The user has the power to include qualified, responsible and independent professionals in the project, such as fire protection engineers to advise him and, through his advice, hire the most effective and qualified installer, which does not always imply a contracting of the lowest cost offer.
Contrary to what we might conventionally think, in those Latin American countries where building codes require more fire safety, there are more "sub-standard" facilities (lower than the norm). This is sui generis, but it happens for two reasons. The first, by the force of market competition and the second, by simple corruption. In those few Latin American cities where, for example, an installation of automatic sprinklers or detection systems in high-rise buildings is required, the promoters of these projects, in their eagerness to seek a better economic margin, hire installers whose knowledge of fire safety could be informal, who install systems that may not comply with any type of regulation and very possibly do not detect or control fires.
However, there are areas of real progress worth highlighting, which give us ideas on how to proceed in the future. For example, several fire protection system installation companies that specialize in the industrial sector in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, where the end customers are often multinational firms, do an excellent job.
In addition, a good review by companies that insure highly protected risks is increasingly common, motivating designers and installers to do things better and better. In the more established markets in fire safety, which are purposely not found in either the most advanced or the richest countries, there are a few companies that have educated a significant group of users and they in turn have seen the benefit of requiring good fire protection engineering and hiring only the most specialized contractors.
The future is the adoption and adaptation of NFPA regulations, as has already been seen in several countries in the region. But effective and efficient fire safety cannot be obtained by decree. It is obtained when the user understands that fire safety is important. It is obtained when there is a group of ethical designers and installers, trained and who offer quality as their final product. It is obtained when there is a serious and qualified competent authority. Once these factors are present, we can then hope for a lasting solution to the current situation.
*Jaime A. Moncada, PE is a director of International Fire Safety Consulting (IFSC), a fire protection engineering consulting firm based in Washington, DC. and with offices in Latin America. He is a fire protection engineer graduated from the University of Maryland, co-editor of the NFPA Fire Protection Handbook, Vice President of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) and directs NFPA professional development programs in Latin America. Moncada's email address is [email protected]
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