Expert says fire safety system inexpensive
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The fact that most high-rise buildings in the city are a fire risk is due to negligence on the part of building' managements, and not due to the absence of a costly fire protection system and its maintenance, an expert said on Tuesday.
The Indonesian coordinator of the U.S.-based National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), Placidus S. Petrus, said that the managements of high-rise buildings in the city hid their negligence behind the argument that the cost of providing a fire protection system was prohibitive.
"One automatic sprinkler head, that can put out a fire in a four-square-meter area, costs only US$2. Yet, sprinklers are deemed the most important equipment prior to the arrival of firefighters," Petrus told The Jakarta Post at a fire protection industry exhibition.
Petrus was commenting on the statement made by chief of the Jakarta Fire Department Johnny Pangaribuan, who said that the managements of most high-rise buildings, especially those of government buildings, were reluctant to adopt an appropriate fire protection system due to the high cost it entailed.
Johnny also said that around 50 percent of the buildings in the city were potential firetraps because of their managements' failure to install a fire protection system.
In the case of maintaining the fire protection system, Petrus said that a building management hardly needed to spend any money.
"What the management should do is to use the equipment once a week for half an hour as an exercise because the basic principle is that the more you run the equipment, the readier it will be," he said.
What counts most, he emphasized, is the willingness on the part of the management to protect the building inhabitants in case of fire.
Petrus also disagreed with the statement that the percentage of buildings that did not comply with fire safety standards stood at 50 percent.
"I think the actual situation is worse than that because as a person who has been involved in the inspection of fire protection systems in almost all high-rise buildings in the country, I have observed that the condition is much worse," he said.
He cited as an example one of the plush shopping malls in the city that did not even have a proper air circulation system.
"In normal conditions, visitors inside the shopping mall in fact would already run short of oxygen. In the case of a small fire, people standing 100 meters away from the fire would suffocate," Petrus said.
When asked about the effectiveness of using helicopters to put out fires that could not easily be reached by fire trucks, he said that it depended on where the fire occurred.
"The use of helicopters would be effective for fires in dense settlements because there is no aerial obstruction, but there is not much that a helicopter could do if a fire occurred in a high- rise building given its limited capacity to carry water. It would be just too difficult and too dangerous for the helicopter itself," he said.
City administration spokesman Muhayat said on Monday that the city administration was considering the use of helicopters to put out fires in high-rise buildings and dense settlements.
The NFPA, a non-profit organization founded in 1895, has been promoting the application of fire protection standards such as the availability of stationary fire pumps, water hydrants and building smoke alarms.
Such a campaign, however, has made little progress as most business entities play down the necessity of a fire protection system, Petrus said.
"We also can't do much because the implementation of the standard is not mandatory," he said.