Strategies to prevent a tragedy on the scale of a Sydney nursing home inferno that killed 14 people dominated discussions at a fire safety conference in Canberra yesterday.
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About 160 delegates, primarily from Australia and New Zealand, debated methods of improving building safety on the first day of the Institution of Fire Engineers Australia conference.
The discussions covered topics ranging from the practicality of automatic sprinklers to long-term fireproofing of buildings.
The 2011 Quakers Hill nursing home blaze, which led to death of 14 people and sparked a statewide inquiry into safety precautions, was used as a case study.
The institution's Australian branch vice-president, Jeremy Fewtrell, said NSW Fire and Rescue had demonstrated the difference sprinklers made to the spread of damage in the wake of the disaster.
He said a controlled experiment set a replicated nursing home room alight, then immediately activated sprinklers.
The sprinklers rapidly slowed the fire's path, leading to change in government policy mandating automatic sprinkler systems in all nursing homes.
"That was an example of practical fire engineering," Mr Fewtrell said.
"The goal of the institution is to really have a safe built environment across the world."
Ensuring buildings were fire-safe through multiple generations of tenants and uses was also a key topic yesterday.
Mr Fewtrell said builders needed to think long-term when planning fire safety options for new structures.
"You have to plan that the building will be there for 50 to 60 years," he said.
"Over that time there would be different occupants and different uses."
The institution focuses on spreading best-practice fire safety strategies across jurisdictions, ranging from fireproofing buildings to urban planning and crisis management.
International president of the institution and former London Fire Brigade assistant commissioner Steve Hamm visited Canberra for the conference.
Mr Hamm played a leading role responding to the 2012 Olympics, as well as handling the aftermath of a helicopter crash in central London in 2013.
He said the latter event gave him an interest in building inter-agency co-operation during crises to prevent miscommunication and muddled power structures.
"The big agenda we're working on at home is the inter-operability of different services and to stop them existing as individual groupings," he said.
"If you get an event like that, the response is never going to be from a single agency. So we need to come up with a co-operative approach and a single command and control structure."
"That kind of event isn't unique to the UK. It could happen in Canberra tomorrow; something coming out of nowhere like that."
The advice and discussions were not one way, however; Mr Hamm said Britain could learn a lot from Australia's state-based fire and rescue agencies.
"Here there are a handful of fire services to co-ordinate; in contrast, there are 46 fire services in the UK," he said.
"The larger number of services makes it more problematic. What I see here is a type of model that could be better adopted."
Acting Emergency Services Agency Commissioner Mark Brown said the conference gave ACT firefighters the chance to hear about updates in the industry.
"This is an opportunity to ensure ACT firefighters and the fire protection industry are well informed on the latest developments in building fire safety, to ensure all ACT buildings have the highest standard fire safety protocol," he said.
The conference concludes today.
