This document discusses fire safety in the workplace. It defines fire prevention as eliminating potential fire sources and fuel, such as through housekeeping and inspection programs. Fire protection aims to minimize fire damage through strategies like installing detection and suppression systems and evacuation planning. Effective fire prevention requires vigilance in identifying hazards, taking action to address them, and cooperation between employers and employees. Understanding the chemistry and physics of fire, such as the fire triangle and tetrahedron, is also important for preventing and extinguishing fires. The next class will cover the fire triangle and tetrahedron.

1. Fire Safety
Mohd Zubairy Bin Shamsudin
mohdzubairy@unisel.edu.my

2. What is Fire?

3. Introduction
• Fires can strike any type of workplace at any
time, resulting in property damage, injuries,
and deaths.
• The adverse financial effects can be felt by an
organization long after the fire is extinguished.
• Fire is a hazard that can potentially strike any
workplace.

4. Introduction
• Safety science is a twenty-first-century term
for everything that goes into the prevention of
accidents, illnesses, fires, explosions, and
other events that harm people, property, or
the environment (ASSE and BCSP 2000, 3).
• Fire losses can be one of the greatest threats
to an industrial organization in terms of
financial losses, loss of life, loss of property,
and property damage.

5. Fire Prevention vs Fire Protection
What is the differences?

6. Fire Protection and Prevention
• Industrial fire protection and prevention
involves recognizing those situations that may
result in an unwanted fire, evaluating the
potential for an unwanted event, and
developing control measures that can be used
to eliminate or reduce those fire risks to an
acceptable level.

7. Fire Prevention vs Fire Protection
• Fire prevention is the elimination of the
possibility of a fire being started. In order to
start, every hostile fire requires an initial heat
source, an initial fuel source, and something
to bring them together (NFPA 1997, 1–9).
• So, how to describe the term ‘elimination’ in
fire safety point of view?

8. Fire Prevention
• Prevention can occur through successful
action on the heat source, the fuel source, or
the behavior that brings them together (NFPA
1997, 1–9).
• Give me an example, anyone?

9. Fire Prevention
• Examples of programs that can be instituted in
the workplace to prevent fires include
housekeeping programs and inspection
programs.
• Housekeeping can eliminate unwanted fuel
sources and ignition sources.
• Inspection programs can effectively identify
fire-ignition and fuel hazards, then take
appropriate steps to eliminate them.

10. The answers
• Effective fire prevention requires vigilance, action, and
cooperation (OSHA 2004, www.osha.gov).
• Vigilance involves regular inspection of the workplace
to identify fire hazards.
• Action is necessary to correct hazardous situations by
cleaning up debris, installing effective storage and
ventilation systems for hazardous materials that could
ignite or fuel a fire, establishing and enforcing work
rules and maintenance policies that prevent hazardous
situations from arising, shielding or ventilating heat
sources, and repairing or replacing faulty equipment or
electrical systems.

11. How to ensure effective fire
prevention program?

12. Fire Protection
• Fire-protection strategies are those activities
designed to minimize the extent of the fire.
• Fire protection includes reducing fire hazards
by inspection, layout of facilities and
processes, and design of firedetection- and-
suppression systems (ASSE and BCSP 2000,
23).
• Give me an example?

13. The answers
• Cooperation between employers and
employees is necessary to ensure
understanding of their common interests in
fire prevention and to ensure maximum effort
by all concerned to see and correct fire
hazards (OSHA 2004, www.osha.gov).

14. Fire Protection
• Fire-protection engineers use the basic tools
of engineering and sciences to help protect
people, property, and operations from fire and
explosions (ASSE and BCSP 2000, 23).
• Aspects of fire-engineering-safety jobs include
evaluating buildings to determine fire risks,
designing fire-detection-and suppression
systems, and researching materials and
consumer products.

15. Fire Protection
• Fire-extinguishment systems include sprinkler
systems, rated fire doors and walls, portable
fire extinguishers, and standpipe hose
systems.
• Evacuation of persons includes means of
egress, detection-and-notification systems,
and emergency planning and preparedness.

16. Fire Protection
• Therefore, to include in workplace fire-safety
planning considerations for fire suppression or
extinguishment and for evacuation of persons
in the event of a fire emergency.
• What are examples of fire protection devices?

17. Fire Protection
• Fire protection requires the development of
an integrated system of balanced protection
that uses many different design features and
systems to reinforce one another and to cover
for one another in case of the failure of any
one.

18. Fire Protection
• The National Fire Protection Association
(NFPA) describes fire protection as a series of
six opportunities to intervene against a hostile
fire, arrayed along a time line of potential
growth in fire severity (NFPA 1997, 1–3).

19. Fire Protection
• Prevent the fire entirely.
• Slow the initial growth of the fire.
• Detect fire early, permitting effective intervention
before the fire becomes too severe.
• Provide ability for automatic or manual
suppression.
• Provide ability to confine the fire in a space.
• Move the occupants to a safe location.

20. Passive and active systems?

21. Fire Protection
• Fire protection includes the use of active
systems such as automatic detection systems
and passive fire-protection systems that stop
fire and smoke.

22. Assignment 1
• Case studies on the statistics of fires incidents
in Malaysia between 2008 to 2011.
• Discuss the pattern of the incidences.
• Opinions and recommendations.

23. Chemistry and Physics of Fire
• In order to prevent fires from occurring and to
extinguish them successfully after they have
started, an understanding of the chemical and
physical characteristics of fire is important.
• The chemistry of fire involves the ways in
which fires can be started and sustained at the
molecular level of the fuel source.

24. Chemistry and Physics of Fire
What is it?

25. Chemistry and Physics of Fire
• The physical aspects of fire involve its thermal
properties, methods of heat transfer, and
method of extinguishment.

26. Chemistry and Physics of Fire
• Because fire is a chemical reaction, it is
important to understand not only which
hazardous materials pose fire hazards in the
workplace but also the by-products of the
combustion process, which can often be more
hazardous than the hazardous material
involved in the fire.

27. Chemistry and Physics of Fire
• Fire Triangle
• Fire Tetrahedron

28. Next class: Fire Triangle and
Tetrahedron