A commercial warehouse in the Charlotte metro sustained a structure fire. Smoke damage ran throughout the interior. Soot deposits coated stored product across the bay. The retaining client needed an answer to a single operational question: which parts of the installed fire-protection and alarm system performed as designed, and which did not.
The systems evaluated
ARA evaluated every installed fire-protection and alarm element in the building, in physical and functional sequence:
- Sprinkler heads and risers: activation evidence, coverage, head spacing, and obstructions
- Heat and smoke detection: sensor locations, activation records, and alarm-panel sequencing
- Constructed assemblies: walls, ceilings, and penetrations, measured against the fire-resistance ratings required at the time of construction
- Applicable code editions: determined not just for original construction but also for each subsequent renovation and remodel, because the enforceable edition shifts with the permit
Engineering judgment on what happened next
Two factors required judgment beyond straight code reference:
Ventilation. Exterior-wall fans were in place and had been operating. Their contribution to smoke and heat distribution, and to the paths soot ultimately traveled, was not something an alarm log alone could reconstruct. Engineering judgment was applied to quantify their effect.
Compartmentalization features. Rolling fire doors are designed to segment a warehouse into smaller fire areas. Determining whether they operated as intended required tracing both their mechanical state at the time of the incident and the control logic that should have triggered them.
The deliverable
The engagement ran approximately one year. ARA’s final deliverable gave the client a system-by-system narrative of which installed protections met the applicable requirements at each phase of the building’s history and which did not, supported by measurements, code citations, and operational logic.