Originally published at: New firehouse burned to the ground lacked fire alarms - Boing Boing
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Can we get a comment from said “experts?”
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also,
Schäfer said for reasons of safety as well as for local morale, the building had to be reconstructed as swiftly as possible. Whether a future structure would be fitted with a fire alarm system would be a matter for discussion, officials said.
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OOPS!
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*Warning, TVtropes is more addictive than crack, heroin, and a holodeck combined. Enter with extreme caution.
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I think they need to reevaluate their selection of experts.
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Maybe Fahrenheit 451 experts 
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The experts here were probably accountants, not civil engineers specialising in fire safety.
The problem here is that the fire station was legally classified as equipment storage – a glorified garden shed –, not a residential or commercial property where smoke detectors etc. would of course be mandatory even in Germany. In fairness, that even makes a certain amount of twisted sense because technically nobody lives in a fire station and the offices were presumably in a different part of the building which didn’t burn down as it was protected from the burning part by a fire-resistant wall. This classification of course gives the municipal building department (not identical with the fire brigade) the opportunity to scrimp and save by omitting the expense of a bunch of €5 smoke detectors from a total construction budget of several millions of euros.
Once they get around to rebuilding the fire station one hopes they will have learned their lesson and add smoke detectors even though they’re not required, but then again … maybe not.
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That happened in my town about 15 years ago. In addition to not having a fire alarm or even a smoke detector, they had 5000 smoke detectors in one bay to give out to low income citizens.
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One of the firefighters, Steve Hoffman, says four fires have been sparked by oily rags at city stations since 2011.
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I’m really shocked this didn’t violate some German or EU safety standard.
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A local fire station in my neck of the woods caught on fire while the volunteer firefighters were hanging out upstairs watching Backdraft
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Who keeps oily rags laying around? Seems like a throwback from the 1930s
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That is not the story I read. It was because of the type of building it was.
I see @Jerwin already posted the link.
The blog post suggests this specific building was exempted by specific experts. Not so.
But Schäfer said it was not legally required to have a fire alarm because it belonged to the local municipality and was classified as a building holding equipment, not a fire station.
Norbert Fischer, the president of the Hesse State Fire Brigade Association, called for an urgent review of the legislation.
And a Coke to @Anselm
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I must say I’m looking forward for an in depth discussion in the relevant trade magazines…
Not off topic as such, but irrelevant rant about current trends in building regulations.
Maybe this will make certain people think again about pruning existing regulations. It's usually sold as "cutting red tape" but it means that the local building supervisory authorities check less and less of any application, shifting responsibility to the planners and the owner/builder/developer. Effectively less control, more self-regulation. Over the last couple of years Hessen in particular showed an attitude I can only describe as "Lets just rubber-stamp the plans and let them build it. If they do it wrong it's their responsibility. And if any violations of code _do_ come to light we'll just have them retrofit everything or make them tear down the thing. After all, they have only themselves to blame." Which legislators of the neoliberal bend in other countries eying this covetingly.
Okay, first a bit of context:
My professional expertise is in building regulations for North Rhine -Westphalia (NRW), not Hesse.
Every country has its own Landesbauordnung. Which do overlap for maybe 90 to 95%; often with the same regulations just worded slightly different and/or put into different §§. As always, the devil is in the details.
Tangent on the bits about fire safety and how they diverge.
Oddly enough, the most number of divergences seem to regard fire safety. Apparently fires burn differently from country to country. I have been involved building several buildings, logistics centres for one of the 4-letter-discounters, with an identical purpose and design in several countries - the _only_ changes we had to implement from project to project were entirely related to fire safety. I'm still waiting for an explanation that actually makes sense. The different regulations also allow for different qualifications of experts. While NRW only recognizes board-certified experts on fire safety (who even have the authority to grant exemptions from regulations), Hesse also has some sort of "expert light". On the other hand, Hesse clearly has the lead over anybody else when it comes to fire safety in high-rise buildings due to the banks in Frankfurt building them like there was no tomorrow since the 1960ies.The federal regulations do not enter into it in this case.
From what I’ve gathered so far from public sources I think I can say this:
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This is a voluntary fire department (Freiwillige Feuerwehr, FF), so, while the building was more than just a garage for vehicles and storage for equipment, it was not crewed 24/7.
Which is why nobody was there when the fire started.
Larger towns/cities have a Berufsfeuerwehr (BF), i.e. professional firemen crewing fire stations and a central dispatch 24/7 plus a volunteer force in every district, more or less.
Smaller dwellings just have their local FF which works and trains with the next BF closest to them, but they will usually be the first responders. -
The building was officially opened this year. The architect’s homepage (nice renderings) lists it as a project from 2019 which is why I assume that the building application was submitted under the regulations of the 2018 revision of the Hessische Bauordnung (HBO).
The architects, however, are based in Siegen. Which is borderline Hesse, but still in NRW. -
Per the 2018 revision, the building was to small and to low to be a Sonderbau (“special building”) per § 53 HBO.
So, lower requirements regarding fire safety in the first place and the somewhat less detailed approval procedure per § 65 HBO, not the full approval procedure per § 66 HBO. -
Per § 68 HBO, a Sonderbau approved per §66 HBO would have involved a fire protection concept developed for this particular building by a certified expert.
With a “regular building” approved per § 65 HBO, the architect ticks a few boxes on a check list (yes, this is somewhat oversimplified and polemic, but you see what happened). -
One thing that seems to have been lost in translation (and probably in the original reporting as well) is the difference between Brandmelder und Brandmeldeanlage.
Brandmelder (pl.) are sensors that detect a fire, i.e. smoke and/or heat and start beeping. They are quite often even networked together; one beeps, all beeps.
The building had those.
A Brandmeldeanlage detects and alarms… the fire brigade.
That would be the 24/7 dispatch centre of the next Berufsfeuerwehr. -
From what I’ve read in the various news outlets, the fire started in one of the fire trucks. It doesn’t seem to have been a defective vehicle, but the (lithium) battery (or the charger for it) of a device in one of the trucks. Which could have been anything from a torch to an angle grinder or whatever. Your guess is as good as mine.
If this is what happened then the initial fire might not have been detected at all while it was still just inside the vehicle and the detectors in the garage may have not reacted until the truck itself was on fire. We’ll have to wait for the report. -
The building as such seems to have been up to code… so the Brandmeldeanlage technically wasn’t “lacking”, it just, as the song goes, “wasn’t there”.
I do find the planning and implementation somewhat lacking, but that’s me and I don’t know anything about the internals of the project.
(Something, something, budgetary considerations. Yes, I’ve had my share of “you always assume the worst / be more of a team player” discussions, thank you very much.) -
As an aside, there is nothing at all in the regulations which prevents anybody form building to a higher safety standard than the absolute minimum that are the regulations per any Landesbauordnung.
But that, of course, costs (more) money.
Especially when it comes to fire safety it is useful to look at the regulations insurance companies come up with. Yes, you will have to spend more money initially, but this will be compensated by significantly lower insurance premiums. A simple cost-benefit calculation. Bean counters love those.
Just speculating (can’t be asked to dig deeper for this aspect), but his may even have been a factor here. Depending on country/municipality it can be possible that a publicly owned building can be sort of self-insured. It’s complicated. -
At the end of the day, this may be one of those projects where shit happens, lots of would haves, could haves, should haves are thrown about, but ultimately you can’t nail down the one reason for everything and/or blame the one person who flamingoed up.
For now it’s wait and see.
Of course all of the above is just a (somewhat biased) off the cuff armchair analysis based on what information is freely available now.
As I said, looking forward for more information and the real experts weighing in.
And the poor firefighters? They are not happy at all, but showing resilience:
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Two words: Grenfell Tower.
You describe much of its root causes in a nutshell.
But it won’t make fuckwit red-tape-cutters stop cutting red tape.
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