Car Park Fire Safety

Car parks are ubiquitous features of densely populated spaces. In fact, some national guidelines, like the Victoria Planning Provisions of Australia, require the provision of car parks to address the growing issue of street density. As integral as car parks are to urban infrastructure, recent events show, however, that there are emerging concerns with car park fires. Although fatality numbers are kept to a minimum as car parks are not expected to have several occupants at a given time, car park fires are still of concern since once spreading occurs, structural integrity is threatened.

Car park fires are attributed to numerous factors, one of which is increasing the demand for modern vehicles with batteries that have a superior power-to-weight ratio and recharging capabilities. As we began to power swankier and faster-processing mobile phones, we also started using these high-power-generating batteries for our vehicles. In part, we attribute the growing emergence of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries or Lithium-Ion batteries (LIB) batteries to a wider global initiative to electrify vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The technology, however, can pose a fire safety risk when incorrectly charged or damaged. It is important to assess if this has implications also for car park fire safety.

In this week’s issue of Burning Matters, we delve into the complex challenges posed by car park fires, emphasizing the importance of dealing with these through fire safety mitigations.

The discussion includes notable incidents such as:

• The car park fire incident at the London Luton Airport Terminal 2, leading to a disruption of some 150 flights and around 30,000 stranded passengers;

• An underground garage fire in an apartment complex in the Netherlands that caused 50 cars to be damaged and left 20+ apartments inhabitable and;

• 300 cars destroyed in the garage fire, which also resulted in a partial collapse, at the Stavanger Airport, Sola, Norway.