New facilities and renovation projects need to be designed and planned to incorporate efficient, cost-effective passive and automatic fire protection with security systems. These systems are effective in detecting, containing, and controlling or extinguishing a fire event in the early stages. Fire engineers must be involved in all aspects of the design in order to ensure a reasonable degree of protection of human life and the products of combustion as well as to reduce the potential loss from fire (i.e., real and personal property, information, organizational operations).
Planning for fire protection in and around a building involves knowing the four sources of fire: natural, manmade, wildfire and incidental and taking an integrated systems approach that enables the designer to analyze all of the building’s components as a total building fire safety system package. It is necessary to creatively and efficiently integrate code requirements with other fire safety measures as well as other design strategies to achieve a balanced design that will provide the desired levels of safety (evacuation, recovery, egress, etc.).