Exploring Designers Contribution to Fire Safety in Ghana

In Ghana, hardly a day passes without fire incidents, with thousands of lives and millions of dollars lost every year; causing fear and panic among the people. This study is to explore the contribution of designers to fire safety in Ghanaian Public Buildings. The study adopted a quantitative descriptive approach, involving the administration of dichotomous and multiple choice questionnaires items tested by principal architects and chief service engineers, totaling one hundred and thirty-four (134) of which 95 for architects and 39 for services engineers with good standing firms, belonging to registered professional bodies. The respondents were asked to identify the most frequently used fire safety gadgets, fire hydrants water sources, and high-rise building fire strategies for fires beyond the reach of fire aerial in their designs. The study showed that, higher level of priority is attached to Smoke detector, Fire Extinguisher, Alarm Control, Sprinklers, Evacuation/Emergency door, Fire Hydrant, Fire Blankets, Break glass/Call points, Sand Buckets, Fire Heart detector and Hose reels as ranked in order of priority in Ghana.