Providing park with fire protection

With around 40 individual buildings housing over 160,000m2 of prime office space, Cobalt Business Park, which is located a short drive from central Newcastle, is one of the largest complexes of its kind in the UK.

To give those working on-site the highest levels of protection its owner, Highbridge Properties, has insisted that each of the buildings has a state-of-the-art fire detection system as part of an overall building services infrastructure.

ARC365 is one of the north-east of England's leading life safety installation specialists and has enjoyed a long-term relationship with Cobalt Business Park. Chris Harris, director of ARC365, explains: "We were invited to tender for the fire detection installation in the first building. Our proposal centred on the installation of a Hochiki Europe fire detection system. We won the contract and since then we have been asked to carry out similar work for all but three buildings on the site.' All of the systems installed at Cobalt Business Park are analogue addressable and most of them use Hochiki Europe's Enhanced Systems Protocol (ESP).

Stuart Davies, marketing manager, explains: "ESP is a resilient total communications solution for intelligent fire detection and fully integrated systems. It has a multipurpose structure that provides the flexibility and expansion to accommodate simple addressable systems through to integrated building management and safety systems.' The buildings' fire detection systems are compliant to BS 5839 category L1 standard, which means that automatic detectors are deployed in all areas, including roof spaces and voids to give an early warning of fire.