SR410 Assessing the risk of non-compliant firestopping and smokestopping in New Zealand residential buildings undergoing alterations (December 2018)

Passive fire protection (PFP) quality has been identified as an issue that must be addressed in buildings undergoing alterations in order to meet the New Zealand Building Code means of escape from fire requirements.

The objective of this project was to develop a process to provide consistency in the application of section 112 of the Building Act when PFP defects are found during building alteration work. To support that goal, a series of commonly found non-compliant residential firestopping configurations were fire tested to provide data on how actual construction may perform in a fire. The project outcome at this point is a proposed assessment process. Future fieldwork will investigate how it is applied in practice and identify if any adjustments are required.

This report describes the problem, development of the proposed process, one potential risk analysis tool that has been developed by industry and made available by BRANZ and the results of the testing programme.