2025 Spring Meeting and 21st Global Congress on Process Safety
(32du) What Is Your Fire Protection Philosophy? Developing a Documented Approach for Evaluating Risk to Protect People, Assets, and Profit from the Effects of Fire.
A fire protection philosophy establishes the “precedent” or approach to providing fire protection for an entire company, specific site, process, or equipment. Whether the desire is a prescriptive “by the book” approach or an “outside the box” performance-based design, a fire protection philosophy helps guide that process.
Typically, establishing a philosophy starts at the corporate level and is then executed throughout the company to provide a consistent, cost-effective approach to reducing the risk. Managing risk is a key component to minimizing impact from loss profit opportunities. A well-managed risk reduces the frequency and/or severity of the event, which, among other benefits, can lead to less damage from an event and reduction of downtime. Conversely, if a risk is not assessed and managed to an acceptable level, its impact can be widespread and have a trickle-down effect that could cause longer outages.
A common issue of discerning what approach is picking the model that best suits your risk profile. Often coined a paralysis of analysis, it can be easy to get lost looking at all the options and be unable to determine which is best for you.
While a prescriptive approach can meet all necessary regulatory requirements and provide acceptable protection for a facility, it can sometimes lack hazard recognition and efficient use of resources to establish proper layers of protection. Development of a risk-informed, performance-based approach to fire protection can provide an acceptable level of protection as it relates to the specific hazards of the process.
Performance based approaches draw from historical and data driven metrics to assign risk and probability of incidents. Those metrics can then be used to make informed decisions on the approach that best suits the incident.
To aide in this process, the risk of an incident can be equated to a probability or cost in dollars so that the organization can clearly understand the potential loss that a fire may present. These loss estimates can then be used to develop tools, such as a cost benefit analysis, which help determine what layers of protection are needed for each area. In many cases, this approach provides a more robust program that reduces risk to an acceptable level and provides cost savings to the business by utilizing resources in the right areas instead of a "one size fits all" manner.
This philosophy can be achieved by providing a combination of detection and mitigation systems, such as, adequate siting (spacing), depressurization and emergency isolation, passive fire protection features (such as fireproofing), fixed fire protection systems, drainage, and emergency response.
So, the question now becomes “How do I start?”. To develop your Corporate Fire Protection Philosophy, a clear understanding of policies, standards and procedures, your audit/insurance program, and a self-imposed acceptable loss is needed.
Finally, any good philosophy and subsequent program must be developed through field testing. Using example units that provide a good range of hazards will help refine these policies, standards, and procedures into a robust program that meets the needs of the organization and provides all the agreed benefits discussed above.