Westfield Carindale

We understand the value of each square meter of rental space in a shopping centre. Hence, we develop strategies to delete re corridors that are hard to maintain and not used as a primary evacuation path for occupants. Removal of re corridors increases the lettable area. We also use practical systems like slim line fire hose reels in the malls which require less of the prime shopfront space.

The international best practice is to implement a phased cascading evacuation of a shopping centre, rather than to simultaneously evacuate the entire centre which has many negative consequences. At Fire Engineers Australia we follow international best practice and recommend a phased cascading evacuation when feasible.

International practice is for re sprinklers to not be provided in very high spaces in malls where the sprinklers can be ineffective. Further, maintaining these sprinklers in a trading mall provides risks to the maintenance crew. At Fire Engineers Australia we explore and analyze all locations of the building to ensure the sprinkler system is practical and capable of meeting its performance capability. In scenarios such as sprinklers over high mall spaces which provide no fire safety value, we encourage their deletion. This provides a safer design from a maintenance perspective and saves associated costs.

We optimize the smoke control system design by optimizing the smoke extraction quantities, deleting smoke baes and engineering the makeup air provisions. This is done using a holistic and comprehensive occupant life safety study where the behavior of smoke is analyzed in detail using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Managing your shopping centre asset to meet the complex re safety requirements and obligations can be challenging for any operations manager. In coordination with your operations department, we provide expert advice to develop a simple asset management plan of re safety systems that can enable maintenance obligations to be satisfied and building performance optimization to be achieved.

We offer the below asset management consulting services: –

• Review your current asset performance and develop strategies to optimize the re safety system performance to best suit your business.
• Review your current costs for maintenance of re systems and identify cost savings without reducing legislative maintenance obligations. For example: – If doors that are not required to be re doors are being maintained as fire doors, they can be de classified as ordinary doors and savings achieved on maintenance costs.
• Development of re safety system maintenance tenders. We can support in calling for tenders and support in selecting the best tender for your asset. We can develop asset registers and as built plans for your asset. We can cross check these drawings to ensure they are adequate for the risk being protected.