Performance-based Building Codes: What Will Happen to the Levels of Safety?

Introduction Performance-based building codes have been under development in various countries for the last two decades. The United States has been one of the last major countries to start such an effort, but such development is well underway here, with the notable landmark being the issuance of the first draft of the IBC (International Building Code) performance-track code in 1998 [1]. Simply put, performance-based design, when applied to fire safety, means the use of fire safety engineering for design purposes. Here, I will draw a carefully narrow definition of “engineering”: problem solving by a quantitative application of scientific laws. By this definition, fire safety engineering is a profession hardly 30 years old. This is because fire safety science, which is the pertinent science, has only been in existence for about that time period. Fire protection technology, by contrast, means the application of established principles toward fire protection. Fire protection technology, of course, is more than a hundred years old. Its origins in the US date to the various means that New England mill owners in the first half of the 19 century were already using to minimize fire losses in mills.