• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.105-115
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• 2017

PURPOSES : The occurrence of unexpected disasters, including fire events, increases as the road network becomes complicated and traffic volume increases. When a fire event occurs on and under bridges, the damage extensively influences direct damage to structures, vehicles, and human life and secondary socioeconomic issues owing to traffic blockage. This study investigated potential fire-hazard risks on bridges of the Korean national route road. METHODS : The investigation was conducted using field investigation and analysis with satellite pictures and road views from commercial websites and the Bridge Management System (BMS). From the filed investigation, various potential fire resources were identified. The satellite pictures and road views were helpful in measuring and recognizing conditions underneath bridges, stowage areas, etc. RESULTS : There are various potential fire resources underneath bridges such as piled agricultural products, parked petroleum tanks, construction equipment, and attached high-voltage cables. A total of 94.6% of bridges have underneath clearances of less than 15 m. A bridge underneath volume that can stow a potential fire hazard resource was $7,332m^3$ on average, and most bridges have about $4,000m^3$ of space. Based on the BMS data, the amounts of PSC and steel girders were 29% and 25%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS : It was found that the amount of stowed potential fire hazard resources was proportional to the underneath space of bridges. Most bridges have less than 15 m of vertical clearance that can be considered as a critical value for a bridge fire. The fire risk investigation results should be helpful for developing bridge fire-protection tools.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.79-85
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• 2016

Serious electrical problems, such as shorts, ground faults, or circuits, often cause fire events in the fire proof zone of nuclear power plants. These would be directed to the loss of safe shutdown capabilities performed by safety-related systems and equipment. The fire event can be treated with the basic design principle that safety systems should maintain their functions with redundancy and independency. In the case of a cable fire in the main control room, operators cannot perform their mission properly and can misjudge the situation because of spurious operation, incorrect indication or instrument. These would deteriorate the plant capabilities of safety shutdown and result in disastrous conditions. Therefore, during a main control room fire, 5 minutes of operator action time is very important to operate the safety shutdown components. This paper describes the cable functional failure temperature criteria and conducted a cable functional failure time evaluation using Fire Dynamic Simulator to obtain the operator action time for a main control room fire.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.107-114
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• 2020

With the development of the national industry, the importance of the elderly and children such as the elderly, disabled, and children is recognized. Similarly, the number of facilities for the elderly and children is increasing. Fires at facilities for the elderly and children cause heavy casualties. In response to these events, it is essential to activate fire alarms promptly and accurately and to secure evacuation routes. In this study, the laws and statistics related to facilities for elderly and children were reviewed, and problems with legal terms-such as elderly, children, others, unwanted alarm of fire alarm systems, blind spots of fire compartment standards, securing evacuation routes, and absence of standards for life safety rescue organizations-were identified. As an improvement measure, the legal definitions of similar terms-such as elderly, children, unwanted alarm checklist, and establishment of standards for fire prevention compartment-and introduction of other terms-evacuation elevators, the establishment of standards for life-safety rescue organizations, and provision of flame retardation objects for evacuees-were proposed.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.16-21
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to conduct ETA on 15 components of power installations: the DS/LBS, LA, MOF, CT, PT, A/V meter, VCB, OCR, COS, PF, Transformer, Condenser(C), Grounding, Cable and Connector. To achieve that, power installations work flow and its components are categorized. Based on performance, human, environmental, management, and safety, this paper drew Initiation events (IE) and End states (ES). ETA is applied to the main functions of each component, and the end states that may occur in one initiation event are suggested. In addition, detailed classification was performed to induce various end states on the basis of the suggested initiation events. If the suggested IEs and ESs are applied on the basis of power installations event cases, it is expected to prevent the same kinds of accident and operate power installations safely.

• Korean Journal of Occupational Health Nursing
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.132-143
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• 2021

Purpose: The study aimed to explore experiences of the posttraumatic growth (PTG) in firefighters with repeated exposure to traumatic events. Methods: Participants were 11 firefighters from two fire departments, who had experienced more than one critical trauma events. Data were collected through personal interviews from August to October 2020 and analyzed by Colaizzi's phenomenological methods. Results: The PTG experiences were derived into four categories: 'growth in self-perception', 'rediscovery of the meaning of life', 'deep interpersonal relationships', and 'discovery of the meaning of work'. Conclusion: These findings could be used as basic information for developing PTG program for firefighters such as logo-therapy, semantic therapy, and self-disclosure intervention using expressive writing and speaking.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.265-283
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• 2021

To ensure that fire induced collapse of a building is prevented it is important to understand the sequence of events that can lead to this event. In this paper, the initiation of collapse mechanisms of generic a multi-storey steel frame subjected to vertical and horizontal travelling fires are analysed computationally by tracking the formation of plastic hinges in the frame and generation of fire induced loads. Both uniform and travelling fires are considered. In total 58 different cases are analysed using finite element software LS-DYNA. For the frame examined with a simple and generic structural arrangement and higher applied fire protection to the columns, the results indicate that collapse mechanisms for singe floor and multiple floor fires can be each split into two main groups. For single floor fires (taking place in the upper floors of the frame (Group S1)), collapse is initiated by the pull-in of external columns when heated beams in end bays go into catenary action. For single floor fires occurring on the lower floors(Group S2), failure is initiated (i.e. ultimate strain of the material is exceeded) after the local beam collapse. Failure in both groups for single floor fires is governed by the generation of high loads due to restrained thermal expansion and the loss of material strength. For multiple floor fires with a low number of fire floors (1 to 3) - Group M1, failure is dominated by the loss of material strength and collapse is mainly initiated by the pull-in of external columns. For the cases with a larger number of fire floors (5 to 10) - Group M2, failure is dominated by thermal expansion and collapse is mainly initiated by swaying of the frame to the side of fire origin. The results show that for the investigated frame initiation of collapse mechanisms are affected by the fire type, the number of fire floors, and the location of the fire floor. The findings of this study could be of use to designers of buildings when developing fire protection strategies for steel framed buildings where the potential for a multifloor fire exists.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.136-147
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to analyze four cases of firefighter burns in various fire scenes and to find prevention measures to decrease firefighter injuries. Among the analysis reports prepared by the National Fire Research Institute of Korea from 2016 to 2020, four burn-related accidents are summarized and the main causes are conveyed. The four accidents include second-degree burns from using extinguishers during containment of fires; nine firefighters burned due to re-ignition in the LPG car repair shop; two firefighters injured with third-degree burns from using fire extinguishers during life-saving events in residential housing; and injuries from the radiant heat of the tank BLEVE near the factory fire. These cases are comprehensively investigated in their respective scenes and analyzed based on the fire site investigation reports from the fire department and related theoretical explanations of risk for each accident scene. In the third case study, some experimental research is conducted to evaluate the risk involved with the use of safety gloves. This is evaluated by reviewing Fire Tactics and Standard Operational Procedures (SOP) to determine improvements and recommendations for an efficient firefighting response. Results show that the main causes of burn accidents are the insufficient use of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as safety gloves, and the failure to follow firefighting tactics or SOPs. Through the accident investigation and assessment, it is concluded that to reduce the frequency of burn accidents, the performance of firefighting equipment, SOPs, protection tactics, and safety policy systems require improvement.

• Atmosphere
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.27-35
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• 2010

This study analyzes the climate change in Korea and its impact on the occurrence of forest fire events. The forest fire occurrences in Korea tend to concentrate around large cities. In addition, the spatial distribution of the forest fire occurrence seems to agree with local climate conditions. Though the occurrence of the forest fire shows strong interannual variation, it also exhibits a positive trend. Because the forest fire frequently occurs during early spring, we examined long term climate variability in Korea for the early spring seasons. The climate change in Korea generally has brought warmer, drier, and less precipitable conditions during the early spring. The changes of the atmospheric conditions provide favorable condition for the forest fire. The climate changes in Korea also depict distinct spatial variability according to the atmospheric variables. We compared the regional trend of the fire occurrence with the climate trends. The results show the sharpest growing in the forest fire occurrence over southwest of Korea. This study suggests that the decrease in the precipitation day might affect the sharp increasement of the forest fire occurrence in the southwest of Korea.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.12
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• pp.1671-1678
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• 2007

In these days, Disaster Management Systems have still put emphasis on its recovery more than the prevention of disaster events. However, the countermeasure of restoration has limitations to prevent the caused loss because the disasters often happen and are massive. Therefore, we propose a disaster prevention system for supporting the safe urban. In this paper, we try to construct a real-time monitoring system to prevent disaster events using new technologies such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Geographic Information System (GIS). As a prototype to simulate the fire disasters on real-time, we construct gas sensors and temperature sensors. Our system consists of a WSN system to collect data of the gas and temperature sensors and to monitor the situation information. Our contribution is to provide a prototype application to prevent the disasters from the fire by constructing a WSN system with gas and temperature sensors.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.163-173
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• 2013

The thermal creep is one of the major factors causing the buckle of steel columns in the fire events. But, few related studies have been reported to evaluate the factors affecting the thermal creep of steel column experimentally or numerically. In this study a series of Fire-resistant steel columns with three different slenderness ratios under a sustained load are tested under a uniform temperature up to six hours in order to evaluate the creep upon three selected factors, temperature, applied load, and column slenderness. Based on experimental results, a proposed creep strain rate model is established as the function of a single parameter of the load ratio of temperature LR(T) to determine the buckling time of steel column due to creep. Furthermore it is found that the creep can be neglected when LR(T) is smaller than 0.77.