A pattern of fire risk assessment and emergency management in educational center laboratories M. Omidvari a,⇑ , N. Mansouri b , J. Nouri b a Industrial and Mechanical Engineering Faculty, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Tehran, Iran b Graduate School of the Environment and Energy, Science and Research Branch, Azad University, Tehran, Iran article info Article history: Received 26 August 2012 Received in revised form 25 November 2012 Accepted 7 November 2014 Keywords: Fire Risk assessment Educational center AHP abstract Fire is one of the most important crises in educational centers especially in laboratories. This work tried to develop a quantitative risk assessment model based on empirical data in an educational center, Azad University, Sciences and Research Branch. The more important issues were fuel and chemical leakage, high pressure reservoirs, hardware failure and ignition sources as well as the human errors in educational center. Building plan, occupancy and evacuation procedure, ability of hazard detection, safety measure, are very important in fire emergency condition. All of these parameters were used as input to the pattern of fire risk assessment. Offering a model based on analytical hierarchy process and failure mode and effect analysis logic, the current study aims to determine the factors influencing the fire risk of an education center. Testing the conceptual model for fire risk assessment was performed in the proposed site. The results showed that the laboratories and chemical warehouses could be raised the level of fire risk in an educational building. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Nowadays, statistic results indicate that accident loss is estimated about 70-billion dollars per year in the world. Although risk is inevitable, the loss of accident can be mitigated through an effective risk management program. The need for more effective risk management is obvious in major accidents which, often unnecessarily, cause to loss many human lives, create massive environmental damage, and enormous material losses (Lundin and Jonsson, 2002). For an organization with a strong emergency response system, the loss can be reduced to 6% for the same organization with poor emergency system (Fiedrich et al., 2001; Chen et al., 2006). Emergency planning as part of the emergency system is a guide document to insure the rapid, orderly and effec- tive rescue in the emergency response to major accident or disaster (Liu and Liu, 2004). Educational centers are the most important centers of the society in the crisis management. Although there is a lot of safety installed systems in the educational center units such as: laboratories, libraries and warehouses but still many accidents are frequently reported from them. They have potential to make serious injury to personnel, major damage to equipment, structure, scientific and invaluable documents and disruption of educational operation. The past few decades have seen a wide range of major accidents with a number of fatalities, economic losses and damages to the invaluable documents in the educational center. In the Faculty of Law Library in Tehran University in 1995, fire had burned invaluable historical documents. Explosion in biochemistry laboratory in Tarbiat Modarres University, Tehran (1996) resulted in death of a person and loss of the laboratory equipments. While assessing the fire risk in a building, it is impor- tant to take into account how occupants can evacuate the building. Evacuation is one of the most important parameter can be facili- tated through providing emergency exit and necessary tools in advance. Due to the large number of occupants and complexity of the buildings in educational centers, when the fire occurs, the evacuation is became a major problem and may result in massive people casualties. The last studies were shown that operational failures and human errors are the most common events which cause laboratory accidents (Nouri et al., 2011). While operational failures can be averted by safety-instruments systems (through monitoring and observing the desirable limits of safety integrity level (SIL); it is difficult to identify and quantify human errors. The operational failures can be mainly attributed to design the faults or improper inspection and maintenance. A laboratory development can never be completely safe, but the degree of inher- ent safety can be increased by selecting optimum design in terms of the installation configuration, layout and operation. This is done in an attempt to reduce the risk as low as reasonably practicable http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2014.11.003 0925-7535/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +98 281 3670051. E-mail addresses: omidvari88@yahoo.com (M. Omidvari), nmansourin@gmail. com (N. Mansouri), nourijafar@gmail.com (J. Nouri). Safety Science 73 (2015) 34–42 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Safety Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci