"In terms of its strategic dimensions, Redi is quite impressive", starts Jukka Parkatti, the shopping centre's Real Estate Director. "It has 63 500 m2 of leasable area, 120 shops, around 1000 apartments and 1950 parking spaces. There are five floors in the shopping centre, four in the car park and 34 in the tallest of the four tower blocks. And that's not all. New tower blocks are still being built around the shopping centre, which will mean the addition of hundreds of new apartments to the Red estate in the coming years."
Red has unique details and features that you won't find in any other Finnish shopping centre. "On the roof of Red is a park area the size of Helsinki's Esplanade. The property also features a climbing centre, a free air tunnel and a hub for circular economy operators."
Fire safety in such a massive and diverse building must be first class. "The design and implementation of fire safety solutions on site are the responsibility of PAP. It was important for us that the fire safety of our site was carried out by a professional specialist in the field."
An extremely challenging destination
Jukka Parkatti says that fire safety in a building of this size is not a simple matter. "There are around 10 000 fire detectors alone and 110 000 automatic points controlling the fire system. The scale of the system is such that a great deal has been and will continue to be demanded of its implementation, maintenance and user training."
The Red complex was fire-proofed with a fire detection and sound evacuation system designed and installed by PAP. "The emergency public address system installed on the site is a modern way of directing people in the event of an alarm. Clear instructions are important, especially as the site has a large number of occasional visitors every day. For them, for example, the emergency exits of a shopping centre cannot possibly be familiar by nature."
The PAP made some changes to Red's original fire safety plan as the project progressed. Instead of point detectors, an optical heat cable was installed in the parking garage drive tunnels and smarter fire detectors were installed in some of the spaces. "In the car park drive tunnels, the thermal cable proved to be a smarter solution than the original design, as it was cheaper to install and easier to maintain in the future. In addition, the fire detectors marked on the plan have been upgraded to multi-criteria detectors in the kitchens of the shopping centre's restaurants. Now the detectors do not react unnecessarily to, for example, cooking fumes."
As few unnecessary alarms as possible
Unnecessary fire alarms are costly in a site like Red, and so efforts have been made to minimise them and their consequences. "The fire safety design of our site presented its own challenge, as it contains a large number of separate facilities in addition to the shopping centre itself. The fire system has to be smart enough so that, for example, an alarm in the car park does not necessarily mean that the entire shopping centre has to be evacuated."
Red also has a delayed fire alarm. "When a fire alarm goes off, safety officers have one minute to press the delay button, after which they have 10 minutes to locate the cause of the alarm. 4/5 of the alarm can be acknowledged in this way, thus preventing unnecessary arrival of the emergency services. This functionality also puts us firmly at the forefront of fire safety, as to our knowledge there is no other site in Helsinki, for example."
The challenges of induction and maintenance
The high turnover of staff in a shopping centre poses its own challenges for fire safety. "We have a lot of seasonal staff and the need for training in the operation of the systems is therefore constant. This training reduces the number of unnecessary alarms and ensures that in the event of an alarm, staff know how to act correctly."
The biggest challenge in Red's fire safety is maintaining the systems. "Our site is constantly alive. The functions of the commercial premises change and the facilities are adapted to meet new needs. Fire safety must not be compromised despite these changes and fire systems need to update with them. The person responsible for maintaining the systems must understand them as a whole. PAP has up-to-date documentation of Red's systems and the expertise to update them as the shopping centre changes."
Life cycle costs under the magnifying glass
In the construction industry in particular, price is often the determining factor in the choice of contractors or solutions. Nobody really keeps track of how economical the cheapest solution at the time of purchase will be in the long run.
Jukka Parkatti challenges this way of thinking. "The property owner should be most interested in what remains below the line in the long term, for example ten years. The winner of the price competition at the time of purchase can often be something that is repaired over time and ends up being quite expensive. Red's fire safety systems were selected on the basis of their life-cycle costs. As the site is constantly evolving, the systems need to be cost-effective to upgrade and maintain over the long term."
According to Jukka Parkat, PAP's services are worth using when you are interested in the reliable performance and costs of a fire system over its entire life cycle. "PAP designs and implements cost-effective fire safety solutions, and they have experience in large and demanding projects. In my experience, PAP's experts are reliable specialists in their field who know what they are talking about and what they are doing."
Artikkelin kuva: Janne Hirvonen