An analysis of the fire safety codes in Brazil: Is the performance-based approach the best practice?

In Brazil, the fire safety codes are based on a prescriptive approach: however, a considerable number of fire accidents have shown that these codes might not have been providing the fire safety as they should have. In fact, nowadays some countries, such as the UK, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada and Japan, have already started to change their fire safety codes from a prescriptive approach to a performance-based one. The performance-based codes attempt to provide clearer guidance than the prescriptive codes taking into consideration the actual growing complexity of the architectural designs, which introduces more fire risks. Nevertheless, in the Brazilian context, many difficulties are found for the implementation and development of such types of fire safety codes. Some of these difficulties that could be mentioned are: the perception of the fire risks and the laws. Both of them are considered crucial barriers for the development and implementation of the performance-based codes. In reality, these two issues can be associated with what here has been called as "fire safety culture". Therefore, the objective of this paper is to make an analysis of the fire safety codes for buildings in Brazil. For this, the discussion on what the most appropriate practice for fire safety in Brazil should be is promoted in this paper. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.