Fire protection matters to every travel agency. Your company requires an office, a place where your customers can congregate to engage you directly. You need to guarantee the safety of your workers, visitors, and customers in case a fire breaks out.
This is why the field of fire protection is so important. It studies the behavior of fire with the intention of creating systems that can mitigate the destruction it has been known to cause. Even though performance fire protection is all the rage today, it has only recently gained traction among fire protection experts.
This is because most buildings are constructed according to prescriptive codes that are supposed to safeguard the lives of occupants by ensuring that specific tools and avenues have been put in place to provide routes of escape and means of minimizing the destruction if a fire breaks down.
Some people think that performance fire protection is unnecessary in regions whose authorities expect project managers to adhere to strict building codes. But if you have a choice in the matter, you should ensure that performance-based fire protection is deployed at your travel agency. This is what you should know:
1). Understanding performance-based Fire Protection
The purpose of performance-based fire protection is to take the unique attributes of a building into account when designing fire protection systems and protocols. The common practice in many places involves the use of a generic checklist with requirements based on codes that every building must meet to receive approval.
The field of performance-based fire protection uses scientific tools to customize fire protection systems. It doesn’t rely solely on the demands of construction codes because they do not take the distinct characteristics of each building into account.
2). The Role of Building Codes
As was noted above, the objective of building codes is to ensure that each building is constructed in a manner that can safeguard its occupants in the event of a fire. Building codes will specify the number of exits that should be present in each section of your office, the maximum distance a person would have to travel to reach the exterior, the location of the exits, and so much more.
These codes have their place. However, they are restrictive because they do not account for the unique challenges surrounding each building.
3). The Benefits of Performance-based Fire Protection
You can still use performance-based fire protection to secure your travel agency’s premises without falling afoul of the building codes in your area. The law allows engineers to use alternative means to achieve the same outcomes stipulated in the building codes.
Performance-based fire protection is worth the investment because it is more flexible. It uses science and engineering to identify the best methods of protecting your offices from fire. In the long run, it is more cost-effective because it will prevent you from spending money on components that are demanded by your local fire code even though they have no tangible benefits for your specific situation.
Performance-based systems are crafted by engineers who will run simulations to make certain that they have accounted and catered for every possible eventuality.