In the past twenty years, many severe basement fires occurred and caused huge losses of human lives and damages to property in Taiwan. During a building fire, smoke at high temperatures and poisonous gases (such as CO) may easily spread through corridors and ventilation systems in the entire building. Therefore, protecting against the basement fires in commercial buildings is of important concern for Taiwan’s fire protection authority. This paper utilizes FDS (Fire Dynamic Simulator) to construct a computer simulation model for investigating the Cardon basement fire that occurred in Taipei (1993). The fire accident unfortunately caused tremendous property losses and heavy casualties (22 died and 7 were injured). The major important parameters of the flow field - such as speed to the spread of fire, smoke movement, upper layer temperature, and CO concentration are obtained to analyze and understand the fire dynamic characteristics. The computed results reasonably agree with post-accident reports. The simulation results obtained may be utilized to improve the better and safer designs for basement building fire protection capability. The information can also be valuable for the similar fire disaster prevention and mitigation in the future.
Career captain dies and 9 fire fighters injured in a multistory medical building fire - North Carolina.
