RISK MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

Risk Management Program

Abstract

A fire safety ranking system (FSRS), excluding the fire safety management at the moment, is proposed for assessing the fire safety provisions for existing karaoke establishments in Hong Kong. The objective is to investigate how far existing karaokes deviate from the expectation of new codes. Suitable fire safety management can then be worked out based on the scores. There are three attributes in the FSRS grouped as the key parameters for local fire safety requirements, passive building design and active fire protection systems. From the results of a survey carried out in May 2000, fire safety of 19 karaokes is rated by studying their architectural features and interior details. The results are compared with those by the National Fire Protection Association-Fire Safety Evaluation System (NFPA-FSES) on the part on fire safety parameters. Apart from dealing with fire spreading for interior finish, the proposed FSRS and NFPA-FSES are similar. The study of 19 of the existing karaoke establishments shows that the assessed level of fire safety is similar to the result of an assessment using the modified American system of evaluation.

Risk Management Program

1. Introduction

Many people in Hong Kong (now the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region HKSAR) enjoy spending their leisure time in karaokes. Karaokes are observed to be crowded with people during weekends and public holidays even under the economic depression. The special features of karaokes are that they are partitioned into many boxes and with long corridors, and are usually crowded with people.

The term “karaoke establishments” is defined as the premises that allow business of karaoke activity, in which a person or a group chant, intone, sing or vocalize in association with or in company with any music or other sound, or any visual image or other information, to be carried on. Consequent to a big arson fire in a karaoke , suggestions are made on issuing licenses to those satisfying various requirements including fire safety to be read as the Karaoke Establishments Bill (KEB).

The approach is similar to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)-Life Safety Code in dealing with new and existing occupancy groupings such as business occupancies. It is understood that there are practical difficulties of making alterations in existing business in operation. There is a fire safety evaluation system in that life safety code for business occupancies [15 and 16] (abbreviated as NFPA-FSES in this paper). This is an equivalency system using numerical values to analyze the fire safety of a building design. It is good to study how this NFPA-FSES can be applied for assessing the fire safety provisions in karaokes with the resulting scores compared with the FSRS.

2. Proposed fire safety ranking system

An FSRS is proposed to assess the safety level of each karaoke. This is similar to a “ranking” method on fire risk analysis. “Attributes” identifying the ingredients of fire safety are listed for providing means to assess the goal achievements. Simplified but robust models for heuristic decision-making are then developed by applying multi-attribute ...