When confronted with a fire protection problem, building management is often desperately short on information and know-how in this critical component of protection for their own facility. It is not that the material is hard to grasp, but that there is so much of it that makes the task seem so daunting. Touching on the many subfields of fire protection engineering, Fire Protection for Commercial Facilities deconstructs the issues of fire prevention and life safety into easily digested information. Written in a conversational tone that makes the concepts easy to understand, this book presents systems and practices that can increase a facility's ability to avoid fires, limit the development and spread of fires, and effectively control fires. It provides guidance for decision making regarding what can be effectively controlled in-house, and what should be contracted out to relieve the workload burden of the in-house staff. The information offered augments a broad range of expertise common to building or plant engineers, keeping them abreast of the divergent subfields of fire prevention. Every facility manager dreams of the day when absolutely nothing goes wrong, the week where no new unforeseen problems occur. A fire protection problem is just one of the many emergencies that might spoil this dream. Delineating current and time-tested fire protection practices, this book explores the wide array of fire protection engineering applications encountered during typical facility operations so that facilities managers can be well-versed, informed, and better able to handle fire-related incidents.
