COVID-19 and the Fire Safety Engineer: Impact on Fire Safety and Lessons Learned for Future Pandemics

SPEAKER:

Paulo Ramos
Fire Safety Specialist
ETU Fire Safety Consultants

Paulo Ramos is a Fire Safety Specialist at ETU Fire Safety Consultants (Portuguese FSE company) and President of the Board of SFPE Portugal. He has a Master Degree in Architecture and has a Post-Graduate Studies in Fire Safety Design. Currently he is doing a PhD in Fire Safety Engineering at Coimbra University.

He is a member of CT46 Standardization Technical Committee, presiding the SC6 “Fire Safety Engineering”, which is the Portuguese organism that works with the ISO/TC 92 Fire Safety. He is the President of the Fire Safety Committee of Ordem dos Arquitetos, the Portuguese Architects Charter Association.

He has been the author of more than three hundred fire safety projects in Portugal, Angola, France and Algeria.

SYNOPSIS:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a strong impact on our way of life. There are a variety of changes that have increased the risk of fire such as the storage of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in buildings, holding fire doors opened with wedges to avoid touching door handles, closing entrances in commercial buildings to allow crowd control and the need to increase storage capacity in industrial buildings to adjust the “just in time” policy of transport delays due to border restrictions. In health care facilities the changes are even bigger. Some hospitals and care homes had to make physical airtight barriers splitting buildings in two to make a complete separation between infected people and other occupants. These barriers can become a huge problem in case of a fire, not only concerning evacuations but also smoke control and firefighting. On the other hand, there are a lot less occupants that need to be taken into account in an ASET/RSET analysis.

In future years, due to population growth and globalization, pandemics like COVID-19 may occur every decade. In this presentation we will point out the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in fire protection and list measures that can be implemented in buildings to increase our preparedness for future pandemics.

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