Site tour to the Port Plus

The site tour to Port Plus, first wooden high-rise building with eleven floors in Japan was held on 30th of September. About 30 people attended this tour divide to two groups due to the covid 19. This building was designed and constructed by Obayashi Corporation and stuffs from this company guided the tour group with explanation. This building is a challenge to build a wooden high-rise building, and technologies about fire protection & resistance, architectural design, construction design and HVAC services are well organized. For fire resistance, wooden materials with fire resistant performance, 3hours at most were used. Performance based design for safe evacuation was used to realize the wooden interior finish and continuous void spaces without fire compartment.

Port Plus

Second site tour group

The fire safety workshop, “Methodology for Fire Safety in Small Elderly Welfare Facilities”

The fire safety workshop, “Methodology for Fire Safety in Small Elderly Welfare Facilities,” was held online on August 19, attended by 56 participants.
As a working group activity, the Fire Protection Engineers Association of Japan have clarified the issues in elderly welfare facilities and have been educating facility personnel to realize fire prevention and evacuation safety.
Meanwhile, the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) also started activities for fire safety of elderly welfare facilities in FY2014, and from FY2016, led by members of the working group, a “Subcommittee for Improving Evacuation Safety Performance of Small Social Welfare Facilities” was established. The subcommittee has researched and now produced a practical design guidance.
To deepen the understanding of fire protection and evacuation safety for small-scale social welfare facilities for the elderly for our members and related parties, we designed the fire safety workshop based on this guide.

2nd SFPE Asia & SFPE Oceania Collaborative Meeting

On September 28th SFPE Asia & SFPE Oceania Collaborative Meeting was held as a web conference.
This conference was followed by the first conference held on March 1st
Asia/ Oceania chapters had been having an exchange event in person till several years ago, but in these several years we haven’t had such event mostly due to the covid -19.
In such situation, Japan chapter has been trying to resume this conference with a help of SFPE head quarter and these two conferences were realized.
The idea having this WEB conference regularly is approved by all the participants with following additional issues.
・The steering committee consists of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Australia and Japan chapters, and also a stuff of SFPE head quarter manage the future meetings.
・The topic will be two choices, one of them is a report from each chapter about current situation of fire engineering and the other is special issues about fire safety such as big fire case, revision of the regal system about fire safety, activities of working group of each chapter and the like.
We are expecting we can have an event in person with all the chapters attendance someday.

JAFPE Seminar: Building Tour at Nara Prefecture

A building tour was held on Friday, July 1, attended by 30 participants.
At last, this was the first face-to-face training session since the Japan Fire Protection Engineers Association held its “Annual General Meeting + Fire Protection Workshop” in February 2020.

Building Tour overview
Building　 MIRAI KACHI KYOSO Center ”Kotokurie”
Location　 Nara Prefecture
Opening Date　 October 2021
Basic Design　 Tetsuo Kobori Architects
Design, Construction　Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd., Fujita Corporation

The facility is a minister-certified building for Building Evacuation Performance. The disaster prevention design work was done by the late Shigeru Yamada (Fujita), former director of the Japan Fire Protection Engineers Association.
The seminar included a tour by the Kotokurie guide staff, overview of the building and an explanation of its innovative environmental technology and disaster prevention design by architects.