Building Fire Safety Protection: SafetyNET

Abstract

Fire is a major cause of human suffering and material loss. When the first responders arrive at a fire incident site, they have very limited information about the building, occupants and/or the location of the hazard. They do not know whether it is safe to enter and how to most efficiently deal with the hazard. This chapter introduces a completed UK government funded project ‘Secure Adhoc Fire and Emergency safety NETwork (SafetyNET)’, which meets and is driven by these demands. SafetyNET provides an information infrastructure to enable buildings, firefighters, fire tenders, and their control centre to communicate efficiently during natural or man-made disasters by using wireless sensor networks and wireless communications technologies. This chapter describes the development and application work including (1) information architecture of the SafetyNET system, (2) the SafetyNET specific devices, (3) the mobile fire tender network, (4) the SafetyNET wireless sensor network, and (5) field trial.