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Extinguishing solutions safeguard business processes

The costs of consequential damage due to business interruption following a fire are often more serious for industrial companies than the immediate damage to buildings and tangible assets.

The perfect interaction of fire detection and selective extinguishing is a core aspect in the protection of valuable tangible assets or major operating facilities. Siemens Building Technologies offers coordinated solutions featuring chemical extinguishing agents, natural extinguishing gases and water-combined systems.

Despite legal provisions and advanced technical fire protection equipment, a fire can severely disrupt a company's business activities. Various studies by insurance organisations show that about 78% of the companies suffering a fire disappear from the market within three years. This is due not so much to the immediate damage to buildings and installations, which is usually covered by insurance, as to the costs of consequential damage as a result of business interruption (loss of production, absence from the market, loss of customers, etc.), which cannot be insured.

Nowadays business processes are extensively interconnected by electronic systems (telecommunications, information technology, e-commerce) and are interdependent to a considerable extent. An interruption or loss of data can immobilise entire production units and severely restrict business activity. Any incipient fire, even a minor smouldering fire in a computer cable, must be reliably detected at an early stage and appropriate protective measures must be actuated before the fire can spread, endanger human life and cause more significant damage.

In the case of protection against shutdown in particular, the time elapsing between detection and the actuation of extinguishing systems is regarded as the critical factor for bringing an incipient fire under control. It is therefore essential that the extinguishing system is coordinated with the fire detection system, and the correct detection system in turn takes into account the prevailing risk situations and protection objectives. This calls for a detection system that can be programmed for specific as well as standard applications and can be supplemented with a very wide range of extinguishing functions. This presupposes detection reliability of the highest possible order to detect the fire hazard at an early stage and prevent false alarms and spurious actuation.

Unnecessary actuation of extinguishing systems can have far-reaching consequences, since in many countries work processes have to remain at a standstill until the extinguishing system is operational again.

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