Fire protection for a piece of Finnish history

The sporting shrine designed by Yrjö Lindegren and Toivo Jäntti surely experienced the most glorious moments of its entire history in 1952, when it hosted the Helsinki Olympic Games. Since then, the stadium has seen countless other unforgettable major sporting events and concerts. Because the stadium is bound up with so many emotions and powerful stories, it was also a particularly moving site for PAP. “The stadium is certainly one of the most interesting, but also one of the most demanding, projects we have carried out. Its cultural and historical value gave the project an emotional charge all of its own,” says PAP’s safety expert Pentti Sormunen.

A project on a major scale

According to Pentti Sormunen, the stadium project took 2.5 years in all for PAP. “We received a quote request for the stadium’s fire alarm systems from the site’s building services contractor, Assemblin Oy, in November 2017. Commissioning took place in August 2020.”

The stadium project, owned by the City of Helsinki and the Olympic Stadium Foundation, involved several different parties. “Ramboll was responsible for the design of the project and Skanska for project management. Helsinki City Rescue Department was closely involved in supervising the site. There were numerous cooperating contractors on the project, and our client was Assemblin Oy, which was responsible for its building services.”

The project was a demanding task for everyone involved. “When such a major renovation is undertaken at a site of such cultural and historical significance, it is certainly a unique challenge for every participant. In the renovation, the stadium was turned into an event arena that meets international standards by adding, among other things, underground facilities for athletes and a large number of covered seats. The authorities had to draw up extensive fire safety, rescue and evacuation arrangements that took all the changes into account. All this alone made the project more challenging.”

The original plan reimagined

PAP decided to challenge the original fire system design for the stands. It specified a heat-sensitive linear heat detection cable solution to protect the stands against fire.

“The canopies over the stands are high up and carry a lot of technology. We thought this would make it possible to implement fire safety for the stands as a whole in an even smarter way. As a solution, we proposed an intelligent system based on optical fibre, running through the entire stand canopy. The fibre is very sensitive to changes in temperature at the site and also provides precise location data on what it detects. It is the smartest and most cost-effective linear heat detection cable option when the area to be protected is this large. The advantages of fibre also include its durability and freedom from maintenance. For this reason, fibre is also widely used in places such as transport tunnels and other sites where interruptions caused by maintenance work are undesirable.”

In the case of the stadium, choosing fibre also simplified the structure of the fire system and reduced the risk of faults. “The copper cable used in the linear heat detectors drawn in the original design would have required 20 separate units to be installed at the site. Instead, 4 kilometres of fibre were installed in the stand canopies and connected to a single fibre unit. This helped to streamline the structure of the overall system, which already had a lot of complex control functions and interfaces.”

In the end, all parties to the project benefited from reshaping the original plan. “Everyone was a winner here. Material procurement became more sensible and installation was easier for the electrical contractor. At no extra cost, the City of Helsinki and the Olympic Stadium Foundation got cutting-edge technology for the stadium, in other words a fire alarm system that is even smarter, safer, more reliable and lower-maintenance than in the original plan. For sports fans, all this of course means even safer stadium experiences.”

PAP continues to look after the stadium’s safety after the renovation too. “We concluded a maintenance and servicing agreement with the stadium, under which we will ensure the stadium’s fire safety in the future as well. The systems we installed at the stadium ensure that we can also monitor the stadium remotely. If the system detects anything unusual in its surroundings, we are notified immediately and can take the necessary action.”

Careful design improves the quality of the whole project

Pentti Sormunen wants to underline the importance of careful system design. “Investing in design is always important for the success of a project, and naturally its importance only grows as the size of the site increases. The more control functions or interfaces with other systems a site has, the more important it is that the design is carried out by an experienced professional.”

PAP’s TUUMA design services are worth bringing in right from the start of a project. “A responsible contractor thinks of its project as a whole and wants to ensure its success in every possible way. The design work we offer is surely the best and most up-to-date in Finland. Our way of working includes actively making solution and improvement proposals on the customer’s original plans if we see that they would bring concrete benefits.”

When the foundations of fire safety are laid strong, it is good to build on them. “Careful design ensures that unnecessary work and extra costs are avoided at the implementation stage. Most important of all, however, is that when a site has the most up-to-date, high-quality fire systems, lives are protected and property damage caused by fires is reduced. At a site like the stadium, its cultural and historical value means that a price could not even be put on property damage.”

Photos: Helsinki Olympic Stadium