A new fire damage index to assess the vulnerability of immovable cultural heritage

Abstract

The recurrent occurrence of devastating fires in cultural heritage constructions highlights the need for more studies focusing on the assessment of their fire vulnerability to support the development of adequate mitigation measures. To address the limitations of existing methods, this article introduces the Potential Fire Damage Index (PFDI) as a new approach. The PFDI is an indicator-based method that integrates twenty-one Fire Vulnerability Indicators (FVIs) into four categories with varying weights. The method is applicable to various types of heritage constructions and independent of national fire safety codes, which makes it a versatile tool for assessing fire vulnerability and estimating potential damage that can impact the cultural values of these structures. The article emphasizes the significance of the PFDI for preliminary identification of critical points in heritage constructions requiring vulnerability reduction measures, paving the way for subsequent more rigorous fire safety engineering analyses. The detailed criteria for assessing the FVIs are presented, and a case study illustrates the PFDI's applicability. The case study analyses a historic church in Portugal and evaluates its current conditions, as well as the impact of implementing certain measures to reduce fire vulnerability. To evaluate the robustness of the PFDI, its results were also compared with those of a well-established method in the literature.