Since fire is one of the most serious disasters, we need to reduce the potential of damages such as injury and burn, which is mainly caused by high heat fluxes from the burning area with strong luminous flames, accidental explosions, and toxic species of CO and smoke. In order to mitigate these losses, it is important to consider the appropriate room design with exits in the building for setting the safe evacuation route, coupled with effective instruments of fire extinguishers and alarms. For example, a sprinkler is an instrument used to put out a small fire. According to the legislative requirement, a fire sprinkler system is needed in shared accommodation buildings such as hotels. In planning individual actions for safety and in evaluating the effective instruments, it is necessary to understand the phenomena in fire and construct the fire evacuation plan in advance. For this purpose, the establishment of appropriate safety guidelines is essential, and the prediction of evacuees’ behaviors in case of fire is important. However, it may be impractical to demonstrate the real fire, because the experiments are expectedly huge and dangerous. To assess the sprinkler during evacuation dynamics, it could be fruitful to conduct a numerical simulation. In this study, we simulated the compartment fire by FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator). We changed the amount of water and the placement of the sprinklers. Based on data of fire dynamics by FDS simulations, we carried out the evacuation simulation. We examined the effect of sprinklers on the evacuation dynamics in terms of the fire spread and the smoke flow. Then, we discussed the evacuation time and CO exposure time during fire evacuation.
The authors have developed a simulation system, which has the functions of simulating urban fire spread and fire brigades operation to the fires. This system is basically aimed for the command control by a headquarters of fire stations to quickly produce information on the performance of fire-fighting operation of fire engines against multiple simultaneous post-earthquake fires. In this paper, we conducted risk assessment of post-earthquake fires by using this system for a densely built-up area in some medium-sized city in Kanagawa prefecture. We did case studies of fire risk assessment by changing the conditions of fire-fighting operation such as the number of fire engines, cisterns, and the number of fire ignitions relative to the case with no fire-fighting operation. The result from the case studies shows that there is a very high fire-risk area found in the southeastern part of the city, where the urban planning for improving fire safety is inevitably required in addition to the upgrade of fire-fighting resources such as the number of fire engines and cisterns.