Sydney had a spectacular fire emergency right in the heart of the city on Australia Day. Dense smoke and flames were seen pouring from the roof of a new apartment building in Castelreagh street and over a hundred people were quickly evacuated as city fire trucks raced to the scene. Fire crews brought the blaze under control and nobody was injured, but this fire has implications that need to be addressed. This particular fire became a major blaze because a safety measure intended to keep the building safe from fire actually worked in reverse !
Modern city buildings are designed to bring people back to living in the inner city. We have adopted the " Vertical Village " concept because there must be limits to outer expansion and all the services already in place can service new buildings far cheaper than creating new facilities in distant suburbs. The favoured concept is a tower block of apartments with basement parking for residents cars, and with shops and restaurants at street level. The law requires that such buildings must be equipped with fire safety sprinklers as a safety measure.
It is interesting to consider how this fire emergency developed. The proprietor of a Chinese restaurant within the building was preparing for the Australia Day lunch rush by precooking fish. The method used in commercial cooking is heated oil in a commercial stove being used to fry food and if the heat setting is a little high it can cause this oil to become a flash fire - and that was exactly what happened on Australia Day.
The proprietor was using an appropriate fire extinguisher to fight the fire - when the automatic sprinkler system activated - and delivered the result fire authorities warn all householders never to do. Putting water on an oil fire causes the fire to explode and vastly increase in volume, and so this containable fire in a restaurant kitchen got out of control and roared up the central atrium and exited via the roof.
When the fire services arrived they needed to isolate the sprinkler system and use foam to quell the fire. The restaurant kitchen was badly damaged, but the rest of the building survived, and after a nasty scare residents were allowed to return to their units - but surely there is a lesson to be learned from this incident !
How many other fire sprinkler equipped buildings have restaurants in which the sprinkler system extends to the kitchen cooking area ? It is an entirely wrong mix to have a water sprinkler system guarding fire safety above a cooking vat containing oil. In the event of a cooking flash-over, exactly what happened in that Castlereagh street fire will be the result.
In many cases, restaurants are part of the plan for new apartment buildings, but sometimes they are an additional installation in the later life and it seems essential that fire safety should be part of the inspection process whenever a building zoning change occurs. It is now obvious that somehow this danger was allowed to happen when that fire occurred on Australia Day.
We would be prudent to insist that water sprinklers be isolated above any area where oil cooking is in process and replaced with either foam or carbon dioxide activated fire measures. If nothing else, that Australia Day fire was a clear warning that the safety issue of sprinkler systems needs revision !
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