Learning from Real Fire Incidents : a Methodology for Case Studies

Much information has been gathered through the years from fires in fire investigation reports or as statistics. The information might have been collected centrally by an agency, an insurance company or locally by the local fire service. The information can be used to learn from these events and to improve the fire safety in buildings. In this paper a methodology to find technical deficiencies in fire safety in buildings are presented. The methodology offers a systematic way of presenting several events to be able to draw cross-event conclusions that can represent a systematic problem in the studied system. The methodology is demonstrated in the article with a study of severe school fires in Sweden, with the purpose to find underlying factors that causes some fires to grow large. The methodology is believed to be a useful tool to find underlying factors or causes to fires