The car park

pww235 said:

Annual inspection of the EVSE installation

Some EVSE do get abused by customers.  Some EVSE get the charging cable cut off or stolen 

pww235 said:

Life safety systems should already be in fire resistant cabling. LSZH for everything else should suffice.

Some could argue that the Public Announcement / Evacuation Announcement is Life Safety

Some could argue that the evacuation lift SHOULD replace the passenger lift

Sergio Fernandez said:

Some could argue that the Public Announcement / Evacuation Announcement is Life Safety

Definitely already is: was delayed a day on Coll because the tannoy had failed on the boat and a replacement had to be shipped (sic) from elsewhere before the boat could sail from Oban.

Philip Oakley said:

Some could argue that the Public Announcement / Evacuation Announcement is Life Safety

When I wrote the above I was actually thinking of car parks but I can see how it also applies of RORO Ferry.

Nice little Whisky distillery in Oban.  Remember the locals pronounce it Oh..Bin

I've gone down a rabbit hole this afternoon and now know the difference between RO-RO and RO-PAX ferries... 

I was on a RO-PAX ferry at the weekend  

What about chain pulled ferry like Sandbanks Ferry (Poole, Dorset): Links Sandbanks to Studland?  Sometimes they are referred to as a Floating Bridge

Cowes Floating Bridge on the Isle of Wight

Sergio Fernandez said:

What about chain pulled ferry like Sandbanks Ferry (Poole, Dorset): Links Sandbanks to Studland?

I've been on that a few times Sergio. I have family down that way and visit often. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

I am not trying to vilify the EV but fires do happen in car parks.  There initial cause could be by 

Oh absolutely. I'm just mindful that there is a lot of alarmist talk about EV fires at the moment, some just due to fear of the new and some rather more mischievous (for a variety of reasons, whether political, financial, or just for the fun of being provocative). So as engineers I think it is helpful if we try to get such discussions to be evidence based, and make sure that we don't inadvertently fan the flames.

And don't forget to balance the number of car park fires against the cost of safety measures...which is exactly what the parties involved in researching this issue will be doing. Safety engineering is often a thankless profession. (In fact, it's nearly always is a thankless profession - no-one ever notices the level of risk going down, they only notice the cost of projects and project delays going up.) 

There's a reason that events like Grenfell take so long to come to changes to regulations and guidance, which will be the case here too - any changes to solve one problem can have unintended detrimental effects on another. Including for example the possibility that tower blocks, or car parks in this case, get closed as unsafe, which would be as equally unacceptable to society as the occasional fire is.  As an example, a really interesting question would be how many people have died in collisions (car to pedestrian) in multi-storey carparks against how many people have died in fires (I suspect very considerably more die in collisions), it would be perfectly possible to bring in fire preventative measures that make that situation worse e.g. by reducing visibility of moving vehicles through the introduction of fire breaks.

If you're really interested in this issue (which from your various posts here you clearly are) I'd strongly recommend a dive into the literature of risk management, it is a really interesting area (at least, I think so, which is why I work in it!), but it's definitely one where nothing is ever easy. And it is very often about politics and money as much as about technology and other mitigations - for example if we genuinely wanted to reduce deaths due to vehicles we would reduce road speeds (far, far more important as a risk than car park fires), but as a society we don't want to do that. Which is fine, every society has to decide for itself the level of risk it accepts. Same here, any measures to reduce fires will need to evidence how many lives will be saved vs the inconvenience (including extra cost) of installing them. (Again, hence why the fallout from Grenfell is still rumbling on.)

In the end personally I just have to trust that others are looking at these issues, because I know enough to know that I don't know enough to even start thinking about them. (As it happens I do very very occasionally have to lead fire safety risk assessments for construction projects of the type of scale we're discussing here, for new railway station build projects including car parks, I don't touch that side of the work with a bargepole other than to check that experienced fire risk assessors are involved.) Now if you wanted to start a discussion about how to stop people being killed at level crossings, that I definitely could join in to!

Apologies if this comes across as "we shouldn't be bothering ourselves with this, leave it to the professionals", that is most definitely not my intention. It's definitely a good thing in the IET to promote looking at how these types of incidents are reacted to and why mitigation measures are chosen. What would be very interesting and useful would be to try to get a speaker to an IET LN or TPN talk on how these safety measures in car parks are changing - and why some of them aren't. That would be a good approach to the "why don't they just..." questions, which would result in lots of learning opportunities.

Anybody who has served in either the RN or merchant fleet is only too well aware of the risks of fires at sea. Unlike in Liverpool, you cannot make pumps 12.

I have only ever seen the Sandbanks ferry from the water, but if push comes to shove, you can always jump in the oggin. The same option is unlikely to succeed in the Channel (even more so on the ferry to the Isle of Man or Dublin) unless there is a passing small boat.

Andy Millar said:

genuinely wanted to reduce deaths due to vehicles we would reduce road speeds

One only has to look at the Daily XXX headlines for the cost of traffic queues to realise how 'competitive' the safety market is. (Other anti-woke scandal sheets available;-)

See Rasmussen's "Cognitive Systems Engineering" accident trajectory diagram (fig 6.3, p149) showing how we bounce along the boundaries of acceptability and safety.

We could indeed go back to having vehicles preceded by a man person with a red flag, but that measure would be about 122 years too late. Doubtless some of the flag bearers would be run over and killed. That might be by cyclists or horses.

We would also have to add to the equation that ambulances might be slowed down, but as a special dispensation they might be allowed to have an athlete running with a flashing blue flag.

Be careful what you wish for!