Quantitative fire risk assessment for an office building

In Romania, the risk of a fire occurring within a building is determined in a very conservative manner, as a function of the building occupancy type and the thermal load contained within each enclosure. The result is a qualitative expression of low, moderate or high fire risk. On the other hand, the fire is a serious hazard which has to be taken into account within the decision-making process by any organisation for the elaboration of their risk assessments and the risk management strategies. Nevertheless, the one carrying out a fire risk assessment has a various range of methods and techniques to apply, [1, 2] since the legislation does not specifically require a certain approach. This article is an example study of the application of Bayesian statistics to determine the probability of a fire occurring within an office building, due to an electrical fault.