The idea comes from the final degree project of Joaquín Llácer, technical architect and Fire Chief of the city of Alicante. And since 2021 it is applied to the 135 tallest buildings in the municipality, all those that rise 12 floors or more above the ground floor. On its façade, a QR whose data can only be downloaded from mobile phones and the local fire extinguishing service immediately offers the complete file of the building and the resources it has to respond to the fire.
"Time is the main key when fighting a fire," explains Javier Domínguez, as his partner, Fire Corpsman and technical architect. If upon receiving the notification they know the exact direction of the fire, they do not even need to access the QR, at the base of operations they consult the EGA file (high-rise buildings) and the troops have all the information they need. The system has already had practical application on several occasions, "and before arriving at the incident we already know if there is a dry column, what state it is in, what pressure we are going to encounter, what accesses there are..."
The information includes access to the building, structure, garages, dry columns to facilitate the installation of water to extinguish the fire more quickly, stairs to install the vertical hose and elevators.
Thus, firefighters know in advance the entrances, the building plans, hydrant supply points, the best intervention methods with the attack plan according to the height where the fire is, a media situation plan, and information with the technical sheet and contact telephone numbers, which even includes people with reduced mobility who live on one of its floors.
Domínguez explains that colleagues from other bodies in different parts of Spain have been interested in the system, although at the moment they have not received official requests for information from public organizations. He adds that the catalog of buildings includes those with heights of 12 floors or more because it is considered "the border" from which the extinction of the fire entails greater difficulties at a hydraulic level, in addition to the fact that just including those with 10 floors would multiply the figure up to a number that is difficult to assume with its resources.
Although in Alicante there are many tall buildings of a certain age, with buildings such as the Riscal, Gran Sol or the Torre Vistamar, erected in the 60s, all of them have modernized their fire protection systems and undergo periodic inspections, explains the corporal.
In their review these days, the Alicante firefighters have not found facades similar to that of the building that burned down so quickly in Valencia last week, but in this case they are going to expand the search to the rest of the municipality's housing stock, because the The behavior of the fire in Campanar was also surprising to them, and they consider it prudent to locate any property with these characteristics to study it in depth.
