Fire Protection & Life Safety Engineering
With our fire protection and life safety engineering services, SmithGroup provides in-house fire protection engineering, fire/egress modeling, and life safety/code consulting expertise for all building types and complexities. Working closely with our architects, planners, designers and MEP engineers from the first phases of conceptual design through construction, the fire protection/life safety team provides timely, cost-effective and value-added solutions that mitigate budget and schedule risk.
As a result, buildings are better coordinated, code compliant, safer, more functional and—because the engineering solutions allow for flexibility in design—more beautiful.
Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
Our team of fire protection and life safety professionals have specialized degrees and professional licensures which are accompanied by extensive expertise in code consulting, fire modeling and design of complex fire-safety systems. These include water-based and non-water-based automatic suppression systems, integrated campus-wide fire alarm systems, mass notification systems, and high-rise voice evacuation alarm systems. Our fire and egress modeling capabilities allow us to apply performance-based design approach to design unique buildings while maintaining acceptable levels of fire and life safety or to respond to challenging conditions that would otherwise prevent the adaptive reuse of existing buildings.
With that experience comes a great deal of wisdom to provide and share with clients. We bring real-world knowledge in code-compliance issues and local Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) preferences. We leverage that knowledge to conduct life safety assessments and code compliance reports; generate detailed life safety plans; author and submit code compliance variances and equivalencies to AHJs; conduct facility condition assessment surveys, and much more—the specifics that ensure SmithGroup building designs are code compliant, cost-effective, practical, and mitigate risk.