Multimodal approach to improve fire safety on construction sites

Fire risk on construction sites is a threat to property and construction workers’ safety. Fire safety on construction sites has been rarely studied because fire accidents have a lower occurrence compared to Construction’s “Fatal Four”. Despite the lower occurrence, construction fire accidents tend to have a larger severity of impact. To minimize the loss of human life and property, effective fire safety plans should be established on the construction site. This dissertation is composed of three studies. The first study aims at using news media and big data analysis to identify factors related to fire accidents on construction sites. The authors identified the level of media exposure for various keywords related to construction accidents and analyzed the similarities between keywords. The results show that the level of media exposure for fire accidents on construction sites is much higher than for fall accidents, which suggests that fire accidents may have a greater impact on the surroundings than other accidents. The second research was conducted to identify important influencing factors on fire safety on construction sites as well as their relationships through a questionnaire administered to 1,492 fire officers. The authors identified the interrelationships between factors through path analysis and structural equation modeling. The paths of factors showed the highest direct relation between building and fire factors and that the human factor played a mediator role between human and fire factors. The last study aims to provide a BIM-based simulation framework to simulate fire and evacuation performance on construction sites. Computer simulation can be a cost-effective approach for calculating evacuation performance and fire growth on a construction site. To propose a framework, the author analyzes how to apply BIM to fire safety simulations and classifies BIM-based input data required for simulation. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by exploring factors related to fire safety on construction sites and their interrelationships. This study also contributes by effectively integrating fire safety into construction sites and providing practitioners with fire accident analysis data. This study can play an important role in establishing the regulations necessary to improve safety on construction sites