The six Layers of Protection in Fire Engineering

The resulting fire risk is part of how safety is implemented in a building via the layers of fire protection. These are 6 layers in their simplest form and in approximate chronological order: prevention, detection, evacuation, compartmentation, suppression, and structural resistance. The layers aim to reduce the fire risk of a building, with five of the layers aiming to reduce fire severity, while prevention reduces fire likelihood. All layers of protection interact with one another and in general, if one layer is breached, another layer can compensate and mitigate the severity. There are superlayers of protection, such as building regulations or fire brigades, that act on multiple layers at once, hence their importance.