- Title:
-
Costs of Repair to Fire-damaged Buildings
- Date:
- March 2009
- Organisations
- NZFS
- Authors:
- Ian Page
-
Location:
-
New Zealand,
New Zealand
Overview
One of the roles of the New Zealand Fire Service is to limit the extent of damage to buildings from fire. To measure its effectiveness in this task the Fire Service records a significant amount of information at the site to help assess its firefighting effectiveness. One of the main measures used is the ratio of area damaged or destroyed to the total building area. However, it is suspected this may not be an adequate measure in many cases because of localised damage can result in major costs or even total replacement of the building. This research investigated the real costs of recovery following a fire, the criteria used by insurance assessors to write-off a partially damaged building, with the aim of developing a more realistic measure of response effectiveness, preferably using data already collected by the Fire Service.
