An Empirical Study of Property Management and Fire Safety Condition

Download or read book An Empirical Study of Property Management and Fire Safety Condition written by Kam-Ming Tse and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "An Empirical Study of Property Management and Fire Safety Condition" by Kam-ming, Tse, 謝錦明, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract The issue of fire safety in Hong Kong has been highlighted by a number of disastrous fires from 1994 to 1997. Government enacted the FS(CP)O in 1997 which requires retrospective upgrading of fire services equipment, means of escape, means of access for fire-fighting and fire-resisting construction for PCP and SCB. The coverage is extended to composite building and domestic building by a new ordinance FS(B)O passed in 2002. It is now being proposed to address the problem of building neglect through compulsory set-up of IO and appointment of management company. This thesis argues that while introduction of new legislation may be pertinent, it will not effectively tackle the fire safety issue. The primary objective of this thesis is going to establish that building management is the most significant factor towards fire safety condition, not the building use type or building age as suggested in the fire safety ordinances and the Building Management and Maintenance (BMM) Consultation Paper. An empirical research of substantial scale involving 80 different types of buildings has been launched to study the relationship between fire safety condition and factors like appointment of management company, set up of IO, building type, building age, building size, provision of fire services installation etc. It has been established that among the factors under study, building management is most significant to the fire safety condition followed by building age, building type, establishment of IO and provision of fire services installation. Other factors such as building size and issuing of s24 orders are found to be irrelevant to the fire safety condition. Contrary to government's underlying assumption in FS(B)O, composite building is found to be the least fire-risky while industrial building is the most fire hazardous building category. Moreover, set-up of IO has a negative correlation with fire safety condition which suggests that compulsory set-up of IO does not help to improve fire safety condition. The existing fire safety control mechanism has set a wrong focus on secondary concerns. Based on the analysis, a number of recommendations are proposed at the end of this thesis. viii DOI: 10.5353/th_b3131901 Subjects: Fire prevention - China - Hong Kong Real estate management - China - Hong Kong