Smart fire alarm system links over 1,600 buildings a month in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi: More than 1,600 commercial and residential towers are currently being connected each month in the country to the Hassantuk’s smart fire alarm system, a senior official of Hassantuk project told Gulf News.

Each week, about 400 commercial and residential towers are connected as Hassantuk links up to 65 towers in a day.

Come November, the pace of linking up towers will be stepped up to 150 a day, totalling to 3,750 buildings a month.

So far, 850 buildings were connected to Hassantuk in the country including 250 towers in the Abu Dhabi emirate including Al Ain and Al Dhafrah.

In October last year, the UAE Ministry of Interior represented by the Civil Defence Headquarters, in partnership with Injazat Data Systems, unveiled Hassantuk, the UAE’s smart fire monitoring, alert and control system.

The Alarm Receiving Centre at Hassantuk with a giant screen ahead of them to enlarge the location of the fire incident across the country.

It is the region’s largest automated integrated system for accelerating both emergency responses and building system repairs to ensure 24/7 public safety. It will connect buildings and facilities across the country to an automated alarm-receiving centre that can request immediate dispatch of emergency response from Civil Defence for fire and other life-threatening incidents.

The system picks up on smoke or any glitch in the fire safety system in buildings and alerts the civil defence’s nearest unit to deploy firefighters.

In an exclusive interview with Gulf News, Dr Gordon Head, Operatons Director at Hassantuk in Abu Dhabi, said, “Every day, 60 to 65 commercial and residential towers are connected to the country to the Hassantuk’s smart fire alarm system. We link 350 to 400 towers each week.”

“Hopefully, from next month [November], we are going to increase the output. We have to connect about 175,000 buildings and will complete it by 2021, in line with the UAE Vision 2021, which aims to make the UAE one of the safest countries in the world,” he said.

Linking of buildings picked up momentum four weeks back after surveys, complexities and technical snags in buildings were fixed.

There are about 500,000 villas in the country, 175,000 commercial properties, out of which about 85,000 commercial properties are in Abu Dhabi emirate [excluding Dubai as Hassantuk doesn’t cover Dubai].

On October 10, the Ministry of Interior officially launched another smart fire safety project for villas called Hassantuk for Villas to provide end-to-end fire safety solutions to every villa in the UAE.

SNAGS IN BUILDINGS

Out of 11,000 buildings Hassantuk surveyed in the country so far, over 80 per cent require repairs as per the Civil Defence’s standards to initiate the installation, Dr Gordon Head, Operatons Director at Hassantuk project in Abu Dhabi, told Gulf News in an interview.

“In last four to six weeks, we surveyed around 11,000 buildings, of out which we found 80 per cent require repairs to begin installations in them,” Dr Head said.

These 80 per cent buildings have different types of issues pertaining to fire alarm panels, alarm and smokes detectors and connectivity as per the standards of the civil defence, he said.

“For this reason, we can’t just go and connect any building. We have to make them ready for connections with the new smart fire alarm system. First, we survey the building and ask [the building authorities] to go to their maintenance companies to fix these issues as per the civil defence standards and provide them a snag list,” he said.

The whole idea is to bring these buildings to safe standards, he said.

Hassantuk produces more than 600 alarm transmissions boxes ready-to-install per week at Injazat. Parts of the equipment are manufactured outside the country but assembled locally.