136 P O’Malley
pricing of premiums and competition among insurers has weakened their
clout before now. And it was seen earlier that strong support remains for
performance-based standards of fire engineering that would permit flammable cladding provided that other engineering measures minimise the
risks they pose. The regulatory balance may shift away from the developers
for a while, but the long history of fire politics suggests things are unlikely
to be resolved by single disasters, of which there have been many. Equally
unlikely, given the conflicting discourses of sustainability, is that environmental concerns will prove decisive.
Notes
1 This research was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects (DP)DP1093187 ‘Risk, Urban Fire Protection
and Security Networks.’ I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my
two research assistants on this project, Alex Roberts and in particular Alex
Lombard who contributed substantially to this paper.
2 This chapter is drawn from two studies of the long-term development of riskbased fire security in Australia and North America indicated in Note 1. This
project involved systematic review of the secondary literature on the development of fire prevention, government regulation and fire insurance, and content
analysis of news media accounts of urban fire events history, side by side with
this work has been a detailed analysis of the records of fire prevention associations, fire services, government agencies, and insurance companies, especially
in Canada and Australia, As well, systematic examination has been made of
the technical literature that has grown up around what is here referred to as
‘fire politics,’ and which – while usually objective and scientific in itself – has
been deployed by both sides in that politics.
3 For a close analysis of how this has occurred in fire protection, see O’Malley
and Roberts (2014).
4 While there has been some local council activism over sustainable building
regulations, this has largely been kept in check. Local councils, by virtue of
closer proximity to their constituents’ building activities, have sought to regulate sustainable building practices at the micro-level. However, consideration of the multitude of widely divergent (and often internally inconsistent)
approaches adopted at this level of government is not possible in this chapter.
5 For a full discussion of this see O’Malley and Lombard (2013).
6 Underlying the confidence in the efficacy of these minimalist fire-safety configurations is, of course, performance-based fire safety engineering. It was
Vaughan Beck who first pointed out, and advocated, reductions in (claimed
to be redundant) passive fire protection in the wake of performance-based
fire safety engineering analyses. He specifically noted that performance-based
fire safety engineering allowed decreases in the fire resistance of certain
passive fire protection features, and that consequently this made possible
considerable economic gains, gains that could be invested more rationally
elsewhere (Beck 1983, 1987, Beck & Poon 1988).
References
Beck, V 1983, ‘Outline of a stochastic decision-making model for building fire safety
and protection’, Fire Safety Journal, vol. 6, pp. 105–120.
pricing of premiums and competition among insurers has weakened their
clout before now. And it was seen earlier that strong support remains for
performance-based standards of fire engineering that would permit flammable cladding provided that other engineering measures minimise the
risks they pose. The regulatory balance may shift away from the developers
for a while, but the long history of fire politics suggests things are unlikely
to be resolved by single disasters, of which there have been many. Equally
unlikely, given the conflicting discourses of sustainability, is that environmental concerns will prove decisive.
Notes
1 This research was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects (DP)DP1093187 ‘Risk, Urban Fire Protection
and Security Networks.’ I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my
two research assistants on this project, Alex Roberts and in particular Alex
Lombard who contributed substantially to this paper.
2 This chapter is drawn from two studies of the long-term development of riskbased fire security in Australia and North America indicated in Note 1. This
project involved systematic review of the secondary literature on the development of fire prevention, government regulation and fire insurance, and content
analysis of news media accounts of urban fire events history, side by side with
this work has been a detailed analysis of the records of fire prevention associations, fire services, government agencies, and insurance companies, especially
in Canada and Australia, As well, systematic examination has been made of
the technical literature that has grown up around what is here referred to as
‘fire politics,’ and which – while usually objective and scientific in itself – has
been deployed by both sides in that politics.
3 For a close analysis of how this has occurred in fire protection, see O’Malley
and Roberts (2014).
4 While there has been some local council activism over sustainable building
regulations, this has largely been kept in check. Local councils, by virtue of
closer proximity to their constituents’ building activities, have sought to regulate sustainable building practices at the micro-level. However, consideration of the multitude of widely divergent (and often internally inconsistent)
approaches adopted at this level of government is not possible in this chapter.
5 For a full discussion of this see O’Malley and Lombard (2013).
6 Underlying the confidence in the efficacy of these minimalist fire-safety configurations is, of course, performance-based fire safety engineering. It was
Vaughan Beck who first pointed out, and advocated, reductions in (claimed
to be redundant) passive fire protection in the wake of performance-based
fire safety engineering analyses. He specifically noted that performance-based
fire safety engineering allowed decreases in the fire resistance of certain
passive fire protection features, and that consequently this made possible
considerable economic gains, gains that could be invested more rationally
elsewhere (Beck 1983, 1987, Beck & Poon 1988).
References
Beck, V 1983, ‘Outline of a stochastic decision-making model for building fire safety
and protection’, Fire Safety Journal, vol. 6, pp. 105–120.