ABSTRACT
Large Public Buildings (LPB) like cinemas, theaters, gymnasiums, stations, supermarkets, shopping malls and hotels are more vulnerable to be fire and always with a lot of injuries and casualties and large quantities of wealth lost. According to the statistics of China fire bureau, 142 catastrophic fires happened in LPB during 9 years from 1997 to 2005, which made 992 fatalities and 683 injuries and 8.55 billion Yuan wealth lost in China (Fire Department of the Ministry of Public Security, 1998-2006). Respectively, the total number of deaths and injuries and directly wealth lost reach at 30.47% and 53.97% and 49.90% and 46.00% of the total fire disasters of China during these 9 years. The LPB always has a high density of population and high centrality of properties. In addition, the LPB architecture structure with high space, large span and wild area is difficult to firefighting and the structure with few emergency exits, few windows or immovable windows is difficult to evacuation. As a result, fire risk management is an important and efficient way to mitigate the fire fatalities and lost. Design fire risk assessment index system of LPB is the essential process for fire risk management. Unlike high-rise building and other kind of buildings, LPB are managed by different government officials. There are few researches on LPB fire risk assessment. In this article, we present an integrated approach of Event Tree Analysis (ETA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) to design fire risk assessment index system for LPB. ETA and FTA are always used to design fire risk assessment index system of production safety in analyzing the risk of pressure vessel like atmospheric storage tanks (Crippa et al., 2009), infrastructure of a hydrogen (Rosyid et al., 2007) and new type of equipment like car with hydrogen-driven engine (Rodionov et al., 2011). ETA and FTA are also integrated used in building fire risk assessment (Chu et al., 2012a, Chu et al., 2012b) and to analyzing city fire risk (Zheng, 2004). But in the former research, the validity is always a criticism that how to build the fire risk index frame and how to make the sense of weight.
