Speaker
Ir Anthony LAM Chun Man, Former Director of Fire Services
Programme Highlights
Fire Safety of the Old Industrial Buildings has drawn into attention due
to the tragic accidents in Ngau Tau Kok. Importance of fire safety and fire engineering is arising, in
particular with old buildings under renovation and revitalization.
Ir LAM is a former Director of Fire Services and also the former President of the Institution of Fire Engineers, Hong Kong Branch. In the past, he had assisted in introducing
the Fire Engineering Degree Program of Central Lancashire University to Hong Kong and he was the first Discipline Advisory Panel of
the Fire Engineering Discipline of the HKIE. Ir Lam is now an Honorary Fellow of
University of Central Lancashire, Fellow of the HKIE and Companion Fellow of
the Institution of Fire Engineers.
During the seminar, Ir LAM will share his insight on fire safety and engineering, accompany
with sharing on site inspection of some of the targeted industrial buildings.
Registration & Enquiries
This
workshop is free
of charge and the number of participants is limited to 50. The applications will be accepted on a first-come first-served basis. For
registration, please complete the registration form at https://goo.gl/forms/29BQNKpVHekEWHEn1. Successful applicants will be noticed individually.
Report
Technical Seminar on Fire Safety of Old Industrial
Buildings
By CHAN Man Sze
The captioned technical seminar was held on 20th September
2016 in the HKIE Headquarter. It was
honorable to invite Ir Anthony LAM Chun Man, the former director of Fire
Services to be our speaker.
After 2 firemen’s lives are claimed in mini storage fire accident,
the fire safety of old industrial building draws public awareness again.
In the seminar, Ir LAM started with operational firefighting and
prevention policy to explain how the urban planning, such as provision of fire
stations, access road and water supply, and fire services installation would
affect the firefighting action. He also
analyzed the densest locations of industrial buildings, like Kwun Tong and Kwai
Tsing, while such existing fire-fighting measures of these old buildings might
not be sufficient to handle fire accidents.
Ir Lam had also pointed out that fire risks were increased by
inappropriate alterations, consisting of change of occupancy and
compartmentation without appropriate and code-complied fire services
installations. He therefore advised that revitalization of old industrial
buildings might be a possible approach to improve the fire safety of the buildings
by changing whole building to a single-purpose building, including offices,
restaurants, shops or services, etc. The revitalization could reduce the type
of uses in the same building to ensure an appropriate fire services
installation could be applied. Furthermore, licensing of risky trades could be
another good measure to monitor the operation and storage of dangerous goods, such
as factory canteen and mini storage.
After that, it moved on to case study on what the possible risks of
mini storage in old industrial building were. Ir LAM and the audience were
actively interacted to discuss the possible hazards in mini storage. Several
critical hazards were discussed in case study session, such as fire
compartmentation, insufficient firefighting installation, inadequate
surveillance and fire safety awareness of storage staff, etc.
All in all, Ir LAM gave an informative seminar and guided our audience
to discuss the captioned topic with multi-angle approach. It was inspiring, and
we all benefited from it by gaining insights on fire safety, fire services and
revitalization of old industrial buildings.
Active discussion between Ir LAM and the audience