ISO 19706:2011

Overview

ISO 19706:2011 - "Guidelines for assessing the fire threat to people" provides general, practical guidance for estimating how fire effluent (toxic gases, smoke, aerosols and heat) threatens occupants. The standard focuses on developing, evaluating and using quantitative information - from fire investigations, statistics, real-scale tests and physical fire models - to support fire hazard and risk assessments and computational fire modelling. ISO 19706 is intended to address the consequences of a single, acute human exposure to fire effluent; it does not cover effects on electronic equipment or repeated environmental exposures.

Key topics and technical requirements

• Fire effluent characterization: identification of gases, liquid aerosols, soot particles and heat produced during flaming and non‑flaming combustion.
• Harmful components: asphyxiants (CO, HCN, oxygen depletion), irritant gases (HCl, HBr, HF, acrolein, formaldehyde, NOx), respirable aerosols and heat.
• Data sources and quality: use of fire‑incidence data, fire statistics, real‑scale tests and physical models. Laboratory and model data must report uncertainty and repeatability, and be compatible with the conditions used in computational models. (See guidance in ISO 16312-1.)
• Integration with computational models: effluent data are intended for use with models of fire initiation/development, fire spread, smoke formation and transport, chemical species generation/decay, people movement, detection and suppression (references: ISO/TR 13387 series).
• Life‑safety evaluation: estimation of time available for escape versus time required to escape (pre‑movement, detection, travel) and use of exposure‑response relationships (see ISO 13571 for life‑threat components).
• Uncertainty and validation: quantitative exposure–response methods cannot be validated with human experiments; ISO 19706 requires that uncertainties be quantified and included in sensitivity analyses.

Applications and users

ISO 19706 is used to inform:

• Fire safety engineering and design decisions (building and transport interiors)
• Fire hazard and risk assessments
• Product and material fire toxicity evaluation
• Fire modelling inputs for smoke, toxicant and human behaviour analyses
• Regulatory and code development, fire investigation and research

Typical users: fire safety engineers, risk assessors, building designers, regulators, fire investigators, testing laboratories and researchers.

Related standards

• ISO 13571 (life‑threat evaluation)
• ISO 13344 (toxic potency estimation)
• ISO/TR 13387 (fire modelling guidance)
• ISO 19703 (effluent yield calculations)
• ISO 16312-1 (test guidance)
• ISO 13943 (fire safety vocabulary)

Keywords: ISO 19706, fire threat to people, fire effluent, smoke toxicity, fire hazard assessment, ASET, fire safety engineering, exposure‑response, computational fire modelling.