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BakerRisk® has been a leading designer of blast-resistant buildings since the 1980s, working with major operating companies to provide blast protection for building occupants long before the BP Texas City incident created a demand that resulted in the popularity of blast resistant metal buildings (BRMs).
FORTRESS Protective Buildings, LLC (FORTRESS) understands that truly protecting people goes beyond blast protection to encompass building occupant vulnerability from a range of hazards. With this focus, FORTRESS offers a precast concrete modular building system designed by BakerRisk and manufactured by Tindall to protect workers from hazards that may be present at industrial facilities handling flammable, toxic, explosive, or other energetic materials.
The name FORTRESS is derived from the acronym Fragment Overpressure Radiation Toxic Resistant Emergency Safety Shelter, accurately designating FORTRESS as a multi-hazard resistant building. BakerRisk has designed FORTRESS to be a Safe Haven, providing a high degree of protection from fragment, blast, thermal, gas ingress, and extreme weather. However, unlike other buildings that claim hazard protection, FORTRESS has been full scale proof-tested at or beyond the design specifications for fragment, blast, thermal, and toxic hazards to ensure minimum vulnerability to occupants. Validation testing results and videos are provided to customers as part of the technical package.
Why hazard resistant buildings?
In the United States, facility siting is a requirement of the OSHA PSM standards and is intended to provide safety to onsite occupants from explosion, thermal, and toxic events. The American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practices (API RP) 752 and 753 provide guidance for the siting of permanent and temporary buildings, respectively. While these guidance documents provide a good starting point for location of personnel on site, there is a heavy bias towards protecting against vapor cloud explosion events.
As a result, the design of buildings at industrial facilities has typically focused on the structural response of building components to blast loads and not on the vulnerability to building occupants associated with a full range of hazards including fragment, thermal, and gas ingress (flammable and toxic) in addition to blast. Therefore, there is a disconnect between “hazard resistant buildings” and the actual protection afforded to occupants, which can result in unknowingly placing personnel in buildings that afford inadequate protection.
How is FORTRESS different?
FORTRESS is designed and engineered to provide an easy to construct building that is not only designed to remain structurally sound after a hazardous event but also provide proven protection for building occupants. FORTRESS uses modular concrete construction, which provides a high degree of protection from potential hazards while simplifying construction, reducing the necessary time on-site, and allowing for a variety of configurations to fit a range of floor plans and functions.
FORTRESS is designed to ensure that occupants of the building are not subjected to life threatening hazards associated with most buildings at design loads, which include:
- Significant structural deflections, approaching incipient failure or structural collapse
- Generation of internal debris, both from damaged structural components and from non-structural items commonly found in buildings (items attached or near to walls or roofs such as light fixtures, cabinets, ducts, or wall finishing)
- Significant heat rise that would be hazardous to occupants or would heat interior items producing smoke or toxic fumes
- Uncontrolled leakage of toxic or flammable gases from the building’s exterior
FORTRESS, unlike other industrial “resistant” buildings, has been subjected to a full-scale testing program to confirm occupants of the building are exposed to negligible vulnerability for design basis events. In summary, FORTRESS is designed and tested to:
- Blast: 8 psi overpressure at >> 200 ms (long duration)
- Negligible occupant vulnerability
- Reusable and occupiable after safety checks/minor repairs following design-basis load
- Fragmentation: 13 lb projectile at 171 ft/s (116 mph) velocity
- Very minor local spalling observed
- Thermal: 1-hour direct impingement for ¼-inch saturated propane jet fire
- Local spalling observed on building exterior, but internal air temperature < 139 ºF and negligible smoke/toxic off-gassing
- Toxic: < 0.1 ACH infiltration for main building and < 0.03 ACH infiltration for interior Shelter-In-Place (SIP) room (if selected)
- SIP Control Box, designed and engineered to provide system specification
- Extreme Weather: Resistant to high wind and debris from hurricane and tornado natural hazards
What is FORTRESS’s turnkey advantage?
FORTRESS’s approach to modular construction is multi-faceted. Along with providing a truly multi-hazard resistant building to protect the lives of its occupants, FORTRESS’s goal is it ensure a quality building that can be designed, fabricated, and assembled in a fraction of the time of a site-built structure with the flexibility of providing floorplans to meet the client’s needs.
QUALITY – FORTRESS has partnered with Tindall, an industry leader in precast concrete manufacturing, to fabricate the structural modular sections. Tindall has been PCI (Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute) certified for over 50 years. Through a stringent quality assurance program with inspection and testing protocols, the PCI certification ensures that the FORTRESS modules are fabricated to our high design specifications. Once the modular sections have been delivered to the site, they are assembled and sealed to create a controlled environment for a quality interior fit out.
TIME – With the design, engineering, and testing of FORTRESS already complete, building finalization is simply a matter of the client selecting floor layout and optional items. In addition, having the structural modular sections fabricated off-site removes approximately 60 to 70% of the building construction activities on-site. This reduction of on-site activities reduces the overall construction schedule by at least 30 to 40% when compared to traditional site-built construction. Other benefits from the reduced on-site construction activities include minimizing disruptions to site operations and improved overall site safety. The fact that the modular sections have been fabricated off-site and are delivered ready to assemble greatly reduces the risk of construction weather delays.
FLEXIBILITY – The modular sections can be configured to make the best use of the available space, and the “open” design of a FORTRESS Protective Building allows for a flexible floorplan that fits the client’s needs. Office spaces, meeting rooms, locker rooms, break rooms, bathrooms, and conference rooms are just a few options to fit out a FORTRESS. Our sales team will work closely with you to understand the building’s use and identify the best build out options to meet those needs.
For more information, contact us at www.fortressprotectivebuildings.com/contact/ or call your FORTRESS team at (281) 822-3100. To see a full range of full-scale testing videos and footage on the construction of FORTRESS Nameplate #1, visit the FORTRESS website today!