Fire safety in Australia’s international student housing
Gaps in internationals students understanding of fire safety in Australia have been identified by new research.
The world's communities have become more interconnected in the twenty-first century. As a result, there has been an increase in the number of individuals studying and working abroad. Australia is host to a large number of international students and itinerant workers, which stimulate the country's economy. These populations are constantly in need of temporary housing.
Recent reports have indicated that the accommodations are sometimes noncompliant with fire safety standards. Due to recent fire fatalities in some substandard lodgings, the public has become more aware of these deficiencies and has called for change. Individuals at the Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board (MFB) have taken an active role in assessing the situation and implementing solutions in Melbourne, Victoria. However, this is a national problem and as such any proposed solution must include all of Australia. Our Interactive Qualifying Project (lQP) examined and recommend improvements in the state of fire safety awareness in housing for international students and itinerant workers throughout Australia.
We accomplished this goal by completing the following objectives:
- Evaluating provisions for fire safety in current accommodations,
- Determining the knowledge of fire safety in the target populations, and
- Addressing related issues in the current legislation.
As a basis for assessing the awareness of fire safety concerns surrounding international student housing, our group gathered information by the following means:
- Reviewing the legislation governing these lodgings
- Obtaining student fire safety education materials currently in use
- Researching methods for effectively teaching a diverse multicultural audience
- Administering a fire safety survey to international students throughout Australia.
Our team identified two fire and emergency service organizations, the US National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the MFB, that have specific fire safety education programs targeted towards students. Additional sources were found on teaching methods for English as a Second Language (ESL) and for multilingual audiences. These resources indicated that an effective fire safety education plan should include both active and passive elements. Active education usually takes the form of demonstrations or seminars and has proven to be an effective means of ensuring the retention of information. However, it can be expensive and time consuming. Passive education, which can be conveyed in pamphlets and brochures, is sometimes less effective in delivering a powerful message, but more efficient for mass distribution.
In order to get the widest response from all over Australia we created an electronic fire safety survey targeted towards international students and surveyed in person at Victoria University. Responses were collected over a four week period.
As of April 22, 2009, 1619 surveys had been collected, 480 of which were from international students. Twenty nine percent of responses were from overseas students, which is a realistic representation of the student population in Australia, since, 26 percent of students studying in Australia in 2006 were international. The survey responses were filtered into two groups: responders who were international students and those who were not. Since we were specifically interested in the fire safety awareness of international students, non-international student responses served as a control. Any worrisome answers from the internationals students that were not reflected in the control group were identified as specific problems for students studying abroad in Australia. Responses were collected from all Australian states, with the majority of answers from New South Wales. International students identified themselves as being from sixty-six countries, with the greatest percentage from China, followed by Malaysia and Singapore.
Some trends seen in the results were surprising. A higher percentage of international student respondents said that they had fire blankets, fire extinguishers, and sprinklers in their place of residence than the control group. Unfortunately, over 50 percent did not know how to correctly use this equipment. Furthermore, 18 percent did not know that the emergency phone number in Australia is 000. On the other hand, 83 percent of international students did have smoke detectors in their place of residence, which was only slightly lower than the 91 percent positive response seen in the control group. Of those international students who did have smoke alarms, only a third have tested the alarm within the last month and only 44 percent knew how to perform the test.
Our IQP group addressed the lapses in fire safety knowledge uncovered by the survey by suggesting a series of legislation recommendations and creating FireAway, a student fire safety education plan that could be adapted by a number of organizations.
FireAway is structured for a multicultural audience by having a minimum number of learning barriers, such as complex language. The utilization of active and passive materials resulted in a two-pronged approach to provide a dynamic learning experience. FireAway consists of fire safety information in the forms of:
- Active elements, including new student orientations and demonstrations, such as live bums and hands-on fire extinguisher training.
- Passive elements, including PowerPoint presentation, flyer and brochure, and ESL worksheet.
Our group identified the following areas of weakness within the legislation: deficiencies in enforcement, ambiguities in interpretation, and inconsistencies in identifying high risk shared accommodations. To address these shortcomings, our project team proposed the following recommendations:
1. Increase communication between the different inspecting officials.
Currently, several inspecting authorities exist and each has a different responsibility, which creates a disjointed system of building inspection. Increased communication amongst these groups would coordinate their efforts and minimize lapses in compliance with building codes.2. Allocate enforcement power to the fire brigades.
Members of the community that do not follow preventative fire safety measures complicate the duties of the fire brigade. Increasing the fire brigade's enforcement power would allow a more proactive process of implementing fire safety procedures.3. Clarify the definitions in state legislation.
Vague wording in and misinterpretations of the applicable legislation have led to high-risk accommodations being overlooked by some officials. Clarifying the problematic definitions could lead to these structures being properly regulated.4. Impose stricter penalties on owners for non-compliance.
Owners of high-risk accommodations should be held accountable when their facility is not compliant with the building codes and other legislation. Additionally, the legal responsibility to educate tenants on proper fire safety procedures specific to that structure should fall upon the building owners.5. Develop and expand a high-risk accommodation identification program.
This system could aid in the finding and tracking of high-risk accommodations that require inspection. The implementation of such a program could increase the code compliance and fire safety of the residences.These recommendations are designed to preemptively increase the level of fire safety afforded to international students who occupy shared-housing accommodations. They also consider the resource constraints that most government agencies are experiencing.
Fire safety in international student housing is a multifaceted problem in Australia and it is hard to predict when improvements will be made due to the economic and political elements involved. Any efforts to eliminate this social issue will lead to better protection of international students, who are so vital to the Australian economy.
By Jairo Argueta, Daniel Mittleman, Rachael Salvatori, Nathan Brown, Brian Renda, Ashleigh Smeal
Over the Summer Autumn period students from Worchester Polytenic Institute (New England USA) were in Victoria conducting research into international student housing on behalf of AFAC.
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