How the Sector is Adapting to the Building Safety Act
3/12/24
Since coming into effect, the Building Safety Act 2022 has had a major impact on the design of high-rise structures. In the report into the 2017 Grenfell disaster released earlier this year, the cause of death for each of the 72 people who tragically lost their lives was given as smoke inhalation.
So ensuring tall buildings have an effective way of dealing with smoke is now more important than ever before. David Fitzpatrick, General Manager of SMAY Ventilation Systems, certainly thinks so. He says the Building Safety Act should change the entire mindset of the construction industry, including the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) sector.
Changing Working Practices
The Building Safety Act will change the way we work in the future. Without doubt this is something the whole smoke industry should be looking at right now. People should be challenging our industry to make sure that they are getting the right information when they start looking at smoke clearance or a pressurisation system for high-rise buildings.
The Building Safety Act has taken a long time to come to fruition and it is slowly starting to be embedded into our industry, particularly from an architecture, design and development point of view. But we have got a long way to go before it is embedded into the installation, commissioning and maintenance of the building.
The Need for Industry-Wide Education
Despite the great strides made by the introduction of the Building Safety Act, the construction industry still needs to work on embracing the changes. We have made a good start but we have an awful long way to go and there is a lot of educating that still needs to be done.
The whole point of the Building Safety Act is to help to change the mindset of the industry. If we do not change, we are going to continue to have situations where we go to site and find the system installed is very different to the one designed.
Defining Competency in Smoke Control Design
One of the key aspects of the Building Safety Act, is being able to show competency among those involved in the construction process. This is to ensure you can be confident in the technical knowledge of those you are working with.
Construction partners need to demonstrate competency. But what does competency mean? It is very difficult from a smoke design perspective because there is no given criteria for a smoke engineer.
You have fire engineers, who will be able to do the strategy for you, but often the actual design of the smoke vent goes down to the mechanical team. What the Building Safety Act does is ensure that the mechanical team has the right skills, knowledge, experience and behaviour.
Follow David on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/obviousconsult/