A factory fire killed 19 workers in the eastern Chinese county of Ninghai, despite the government’s crackdown on safety precautions that have to be introduced in oil and chemical industrial sites. The policy was introduced after a 2015 explosion in a Tianjin chemical warehouse in 2015...
Three neighbouring governments answered an appeal for help as the Chouf and Metri regions of Lebanon were hit by a series of massive wildfires described by Civil Defence director Raymond Khattar as the ‘worst to have hit the country in decades.’ Cyprus , Italy and Greece...
When a tank farm manager in Germany commissioned TÜV SÜD Industrie Service to develop a fire protection concept the technical experts, thinking out of the box, proposed a solution which relies on early fire detection using a fully automated infrared measurement system as a key...
Prevention is always better than cure, and there are few better examples than with fires. If fires can only survive when there is oxygen to fuel them, removing it from the air is an effective way to ensure that the environment remains fire-free. Oxygen reduction...
Fire Middle East explores a vital Whitepaper : Understanding the risks of working in confined spaces published by Honeywell Safety Products which explains how to identify a confined space, giving examples and characteristics as well as warning about the specific conditions that come together to...
Misconceptions about employee safety in the workplace tend to significantly impact on aspects such as employee retention, job satisfaction and financial gain (or losses) in a business, writes Daryl Wake, Business Development, Universal Site Monitoring. Safety remains a paramount concern for the industrial sector worldwide,...
Providing October FME readers insight into the design and development process when creating new protective garments is Roger Startin, Joint Managing Director of Bristol Uniforms which for more than 60 years has been at the forefront of firefighter PPE design. New fibres and fabrics Technical designers...
There is currently no test standard providing a robust set of proven and well researched tests to assess the performance capabilities of video flame detectors (VFD) and video smoke detectors (VSD) in anticipated service environments. To assess video fire detectors, sufficiently detailed and well demonstrated...
Maximum Foreseeable Loss (MFL) events are caused by one of three main events. These events are fire, explosion or equipment failure with fire being the primary cause. B. Aaron Johnson, Fire & Building Code Strategist, and Justin Biller, p.e., fsfpe consider the contribution of fire...
A recent project in the GCC has been the catalyst for this article from Peter Stephenson, Business Development Manager, Warringtonfire, which highlights the typical process and hazards/risks that should be considered when assessing the fire & life safety requirements for a desalination plant. With the global...
As organisations within the MENA region have been announcing big money plans for new electrical power installations two recent, highly disruptive and much publicised incidents in America have highlighted the necessity of ensuring the equipment is super-efficient and protected with effective fire safety equipment. It was...
The smokey atmosphere created by the huge wildfires that have swept through bushland in California has become a problem for the state’s winemakers even though many of their vinyards have escaped direct damage from the blazes. According to the California Association of Winegrape Growers most vintners...
More than 9,500 residents living within a 12-mile radius of an ammunition dump in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia had to be evacuated after fires broke out in stores housing an estimated 55,000 artillery shells. There were only six reports of injuries, with none of them...
An early morning fire killed five children aged between eight month and seven years as they slept in a day care centre in the town of Erie in the American state of Pennsylvania. It was later reported that the blaze struck only eight months after the...
A series of explosions sparked by a fire at a warehouse storing weapons and ammunition killed one person and injured 29 people in south Baghdad The fire also ignited several rockets which emerged from the building and struck neighbourhoods several miles away inuring several children. A...
A fierce blaze which swept through the plastic roofs of a slum in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, destroyed about 15,000 homes and left 50,000 people homeless. It took firefighter more than six hours to extinguish the flames but no deaths were reported because a lot...
More than 200 passengers who were about to board plane at Beijing Airport were forced by a fire to abandon their plans to fly to Tokyo. As they approached the A330-300 belonging to Air China smoke started to emerge from a cargo area at the front...
Fishing boats and passing ships, were alerted by coastguards who had no patrols nearby, rescued 245 people from a burning ferry in southern Philippine waters, but a one-year-old girl and two other people died. The fire had started in the ferry’s engine room soon after it...
A massive fire ripped through destroyed the rows of port cabins housing nearly 1,000 workers employed by Darwish Engineering on the Sharjah-Ajman border, a few kilometres away from the Sharjah Investment Centre. There were no casualties but all the workers had to be found temporary accommodation...
Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the dive boat fire that killed 34 people off the Southern California coast. The Department of Justice have confirmed it was participating in the joint investigation. This comes after agents searched the offices of the boat's owner, Truth...
At least 13 people died and dozens more were injured after a suspected arson attack on an animation studio in Kyoto, Japan. Police said that after a man broke into the Kyoto Animation studio and sprayed an unidentified liquid inside the three-storey building which was...
Volvo has launched a worldwide recall of more than half a million four-cylinder diesel cars after discovering a fault that could lead to them catching fire. The cars sold over the past five years have a plastic engine manifold which the Swedish manufacturers says ‘can...
One of America’s leading nuclear research stations had to be shut down as a precaution after a wildfire blazed through 90,000 acres of grassland nearby. All the laboratory staff were evacuated safely as from the site in the state of Idaho and firefighters prevented the flames...
The chief architect of France’s historic monuments is afraid the vaulted ceilings of the fire ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris could collapse in the heat wave that has been sweeping across Europe. Phillippe Villeneuve said the Cathedral’s walls are still saturated with water sprayed by...
Fire is often associated with heavy materials and firefighting equipment losses and casualties and is a key public security concern for authorities all over the world and the use of fireproof material can be traced back to ancient Rome reflects Hakan Ozyigit, Regional Director of...
As an architect or engineer, when you design a facility’s life safety system, your primary goal is to achieve compliance with state and local fire code requirements explains Rodger Reiswig, SET, Fellow and Vice President, Industry Relations, Johnson Controls. While that approach can help ensure...
Female firefighters are at a high-risk of developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and experiencing suicidal thoughts, compared to male firefighters, according to a new study published in May 2019 in the Occupational Medicine Journal. The study found that almost one in three (30%) female firefighters...
Old or new, all buildings are at an increased risk of fire during refurbishment. Here, Paul Henson, Sales and Marketing Director at Ramtech Electronics, looks at the importance of protecting occupants and assets during construction work. 2019 should go down in history as a turning point...
Tayfun Eren, Product Manager for the Prysmian Group examines the EU standard 50575 of the Construction Products Regulation (CPR): More safety in buildings. People spend 90 percent of their time in buildings where around 90 percent of all fires occur. The leading cause of death in...
With the international investment in aviation projects continuing, the cliché that the world is becoming a smaller place still remains relevant today writes Dermot Gallagher, Senior Fire Engineer in the UAE, Exova Warringtonfire. Tourism destinations have been competing to attract international tourists and their resulting...
More than a year of investigations into the March 2018 shopping mall fire in Kemerovo, Siberia, which killed 64 people and injured 79 others, have highlighted safety concerns that have to be taken into account not just in the rest of Russia but also worldwide. Physically...
Local legislation could impede first responders from having priority on commercial networks because of national laws to protect net neutrality. A new white paper from The Critical Communications Association (TCCA) says countries are increasingly looking at the option of using existing commercial mobile networks for broadband...
Projects in the windows and facades industry across the GCC are now estimated to be worth USD 2.7 trillion, according to a recent MEED Projects report. As the value of construction opportunities soars, over 11,000 industry professionals are anticipated to meet this September for the fifth...
Securex West Africa welcomed more than 2,300 industry professionals, who met to share leading technologies within a buoyant regional market. The ninth edition of the show took place at the Landmark Centre in Lagos, Nigeria from the 16th to 17th April. Over two bustling days of...
Perimeter Solutions, one of the world’s leading producers of fire retardants, foams, and water enhancing gels for managing wildland, industrial, and municipal fires, today announced the appointment of industry veteran Tamer Gaber as Regional Sales Representative for the Middle East and Sandeep GR as Regional...
The British Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (BAPCO) held its 26thBAPCO Annual Conference and Exhibition at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry. The 2019 event was co-located with TCCA’s Critical Communications Europe, which enabled even more topics to be covered to a wider European audience. A...
A report released on the side-lines of Intersec Saudi Arabia by consultancy firm 6WResearch said the total spend on Saudi’s commercial security, information security, homeland security and policing, physical and perimeter protection, and fire safety markets was worth US$8.5 billion in 2018. This is a...
All the 100 passengers and crew were evacuated safely after a Fokker 100 airliner caught fire as it landed at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. Iran’s emergency department said the cause of the flames and sparks which shot from the back of the plane as it touched down...
Computer manufacturers Hewlett Packard (HP) has issued a recall of 78,500 laptop batteries in the United States that have been identified as posing fire and burn hazards. The recall follows a report that in 2018 there were eight incidents of HP battery packs overheating, melting or...
Drought hit California suffered its worst ever year for wildfires in 2018 as new statistics have revealed that 1.8 million acres of land was burned which far surpassed the previous record for the American State of 1.3 million acres which was set 12 months earlier. More...
Twenty passengers were killed and ten others injured after the bus on which they were travelling caught fire as it was about to leave a terminus in the Peruvian capital Lima. Reports said the fire which quickly reduced the vessel to just a skeleton started with...
One worker was killed and four others suffered severe breathing problems after a fire broke out in a perfume warehouse in Ajman’s Al Jarf industrial area. Firefighters extinguished the blaze inside 30 minutes preventing it spreading to other buildings nearby but the incident caused Civil Defence...
A series of early warning infrared transit heat sensors are protecting the conveyors at the last remaining coal fired power station at Aberthaw in Wales. The coal-fired facility has a capacity to generate 1,500MW of electricity – sufficient to meet the needs of some 1.5...
The Emirates Fire and Rescue Company (EFRC), a pioneer in the field of fire life and safety consultancy, providing smart safety 360 services, recently made a historic achievement after being accredited by the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) as one of its Recognised Training Providers...
Earlier this year, Johnson Controls partnered with a third-party consulting firm and research group to successfully test a new technology that could potentially save countless lives with early fire identification and intervention for rapid fire protection to the external facade of a building. The standalone system...
Firefighting as an organised operation is as ancient as known history can tell us explains Ashley Price, Vice President, Fire Science Academy, KSA. The first historical accounts of organised fire brigade operation are believed to be from the Roman period in 115 BC, however, almost...
2015 was a landmark year for tall buildings reflects Peter Stephenson, Business Development Manager, Warrington Fire. Across the globe 106 tall buildings (above 200 metres or 656 feet in height) were completed. This surpassed the previous record of 99 (2014). The vast majority of new...
Miguel Coll reflects on how autonomous fire suppression is revolutionising exterior fire protection. Miguel is the Global Director Engineered Systems Product Management with Johnson Controls. The middle east is no stranger to industrial and economic growth. With this growth comes rapid new building construction. Consider the...
The “High-rise” or “Skyscraper” is not, as some would believe, a modern invention. They have been around since the height of the Roman Empire and were built more out of necessity than aesthetics. When you have a large population that require to be housed in...
In this vital article, Roy Savio Fernandes, SFPE with Jensen Hughes in Dubai, illustrates the changes adopted in the 2019 edition of NFPA 72 whilst considering occupant notification signals and standard updates from latest version of NFPA and explains the various requirements of fire alarm...