Assessing and mitigating vulnerability and fire risk in historic centres: A cost-benefit analysis

Abstract

Assessing and mitigating fire risk and vulnerability is of paramount importance, especially in historical centres, where the characteristics of the buildings and these areas themselves significantly contribute to the ignition and propagation of fire. Federal regulations require buildings to follow guidelines aimed at reducing fire risk, which may require undesirable changes to the architectural and historical characteristics of old constructions. In order to solve this conflict, some methodologies explicitly designed for the assessment of fire risk in ancient buildings, namely the ARICA and the FRI method, have been developed in recent years. A study recently conducted at the Historic Centre of Guimarães, in Portugal, in which the condition of 269 buildings was assessed, revealed that a high percentage of these buildings present a moderate to high fire risk. Based on this previous study, the present work discusses the improvement in the fire safety of the Historic Centre of Guimarães through the application of a series of risk mitigation strategies, which are analyzed resorting to a GIS tool. Analysis revealed that the application such intervention strategies, with an average cost of 28.48 euros per square metre, led to a reduction of the number of buildings considered to be of moderate to high fire risk from 67% to 1%, and to an increase of the percentage of buildings complying with regulations from 6% to 58%.