City-Wide Fire Vulnerability Map of High-Rise Residential Buildings

One of the significant hazards in the event of a fire in high-rise residential buildings in cities is the length of time taken to completely evacuate a large number of occupants. On a city scale, it is important that a city’s fire and rescue services are in place to minimize the consequences which can be incurred in any potential fire incident. The paper presents the methodology and results of a study that evaluates the city-wide vulnerability in high-rise residential building fires in the City of Istanbul, Turkey. In the context of fire and rescue service arrival to burning buildings, a high-rise building can be considered vulnerable if the fire and rescue service arrives at the building site only after the expected completion of evacuation of the building, thus unable to fulfill its intended purpose of saving the occupants. The study is based on comparison of an agent-based evacuation model of safe escape times for 1167 high-rise residential buildings against their fire and rescue service arrival times estimated using GPS data. This methodology can be used to inform the decision about optimal locations of a city’s fire and rescue services. As an example, this study indicates that adding a single new fire station in the City of Istanbul can improve its preparedness for fire accidents by reducing the risk of its most vulnerable district by more than 26%.