ABSTRACT
Identifying islands of potential hazard and spacing them sufficiently apart to prevent fire spread from one to another is the approach at Kansai.2 At each high-risk island, containment of the fire by smoke extraction and sprinkler systems is preferred to an approach whereby the whole of the terminal is treated equally. Having identified the fire-risk islands, each is evaluated according to level of hazard, and the choice of materials, sprinkler system and method of smoke extraction modified accordingly. The fire at Frankfurt Airport in 1996
spread because no such island containment policy applied: at Frankfurt, as at most traditional terminals, there was an overall sprinkler and smoke extraction system, which did not discriminate in terms of level of risk.
