Understand the green roof fire risk story
Brisbane, January 18 2010:
Insurance company Zurich, is warning that green roofs in cities could pose a fire risk. The reason ? Green roofs could dry out and become flammable.
Stuart Blackie, risk management consultant at Zurich, said he was concerned that green roofs would become a hazard in a period of drought, particularly on school buildings. But the Zurich company said it would not refuse to insure buildings with green roofs so long as appropriate guidelines have been followed. These included a continuing maintenance regime and risk assessment. Geoff Wilson, president of newly-formed Green Infrastructure Network Australia Inc, said he thought the Zurick company was merely covering every possibility. He said successful green roofs and green walls in Australia's hot-dry climate, with erratic or inadequate rainfall, had modern micro-irrigation that kept plants totally green without wastes. They were most unlikely to catch fire. New technologies for improved built-environments were now available for better harvesting, storage and use of rain-water and grey water.
Green roofs could be a fire risk in Australia if people growing them chose the wrong plant species, such as annual grasses that dried off, or if they allowed the plants to be badly maintained without adequate water and nutrients, Mr Wilson said. He strongly advocated consulting an increasing number of experts attuned to Australias special climate needs with roof and wall greenery.
Sulja Nezovic, a built-environment expert member of Green Infrastructure Network Australia Inc, said: When I started my degree in industrial design five years ago and presented my first green roofs project, a major objection then, to green roofs, was about roof fires and insurance. Another consistent negative was the spread of weeds and the replacement cost of a dead green roof.
This fire risk was constantly debated as a negative, by my lecturers and colleagues, and held up as a major reason that green roofs would not succeed in Australia. The concerns did not evaporate through-out my degree and continues still.
I feel that this is not a knee jerk reaction by Zurich. I would wager that this is a well known mainstream concern of all insurance companies here. Publishing old news without statistics to show that the risk of fire is mitigated by green roofs will only encourage an ill formed and one sided negative debate.
If you can show that green roofs are a fire blanket..fine.
If you can show that the added weight of a green roof would not cause a building to collapse faster during a fire, in Australia..fine.
If you can get through the Australian mindset that you have to keep your roof cleared of vegetable matter because when sparks fall on your roof your house will go up..fine.
Europe isnt Australia. Europes houses and factories are structured to hold a weight of snow for up to eight months of the year.
They do not have our drying and devastating heat..for up to 8 months of the year. If a green roof dies, regardless of plant species, the cost and risk increases.
Britains leading green roof advocate Dusty Gedge, co-founder of Living Roofs.org said that information available from countries with a more mature green roof market was being overlooked.
In Germany, where there are 35 million square meters of green roofs, you get a reduction on fire insurance if you install one.
Zurich did not provide any examples of fires breaking out on green roofs. Green Infrastructure Network Australia Inc expects to further study the fire risk problem of green roofs in Australia.
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