Why did the Wildberries warehouses burn so well?
With the correct organization of fire safety systems during the construction of warehouse complexes, the fire source should be localized in a relatively small area of ​​the facility, which is usually 5-10 thousand m2. Instead, the fire spread extremely quickly throughout the entire area of ​​the building, hundreds of thousands of m2, and the progressive destruction of the warehouse structures of Russia’s largest marketplace was observed. NFPA research on warehouse structure fires
What was burning?
The Wildberries warehouses have storage areas that are densely packed with multi-tiered racks with goods, as well as areas for packaging goods.
The products on the racks are placed on wooden pallets and packed in cardboard boxes, most of which have flammable protective foam fillers. Order processing areas are densely packed with chipboard furniture and packaging materials. It should also be noted that more than 90% of consumer goods, such as appliances, toys, clothing, cosmetics, etc., contain plastic. NFPA research on storage protection and fire barriers
Both zones of the warehouse complexes are oversaturated with combustible materials, which required the designers to create fire barriers to prevent the spread of flames, as well as active and passive fire protection systems.
What was saved on?
An analysis of photographs of the interior of the complexes shows the absence of fire partitions inside the functional zones, as well as walls dividing the warehouses into corresponding fire compartments, which was most likely done to reduce the construction budget.
Despite the fact that mineral wool sandwich panels with high fire resistance were used in the construction of the warehouses, the buildings were still destroyed by the flames.
The rather rapid destruction of the steel trusses and the absence of a swollen layer on the remains of the structures, characteristic of intumescent paints, indicate a clear savings on fire protection. Fireproofing of steel structures can be up to 30% of their cost, which can encourage unscrupulous developers to abandon fire protection. Since it is practically impossible to visually distinguish between ordinary paint and fireproof, the construction customer most likely used ordinary paint instead of fireproof, hoping that there would be no fires.
Numerous videos do not show external pumping stations and fire water supply tanks, which usually serve automatic sprinkler systems of warehouse complexes of this scale. Therefore, if a fire extinguishing system was present, it could not work with sufficient efficiency to put out the fire.
Learning from mistakes
It is very likely that systemic errors in the construction of warehouses and the stinginess of the owners of Wildberries played in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and allowed the fire to completely destroy huge buildings with a few point hits.
Unfortunately, Ukrainian construction customers were also inclined to save money before the full-scale invasion and made similar mistakes. Reality shows that saving on fire prevention measures can lead to the complete destruction of the property, and worst of all, human casualties.
The advice to Ukrainian investors in commercial real estate to protect themselves from fires as much as possible is very simple: you need to comply with all the requirements of regulatory documents and use only high-quality sandwich panels and load-bearing structures, the fire-resistance characteristics of which are confirmed by certificates and test reports. Ukraine’s DBN V.1.2-7:2021 fire-safety requirements Ukraine’s DBN V.2.5-56:2014 fire-protection systems standard
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