Katara Cultural Village

The building

The Katara Cultural Village is located in the West Bay area of Doha, Qatar over approximately 100 hectares of land and comprises approximately 40 buildings. Following the construction of the village the building usage was changed for some of the buildings. A number of new buildings were built and some buildings have been subject to modification with respect to their layout and active and passive fire safety systems provisions.

The Katara management has requested a general risk assessment to be conducted for 12 key buildings within the precinct to evaluate the impact the changes had on these buildings with the aim of addressing all major issues that will be identified.

The approach

The key activities in the assessment included document reviews; site visits and inspections; NFPA 101 reviews and assessments; qualitative and quantitative risk analysis and deterministic fire and evacuation modelling. The assessment resulted in a series of recommendations to ensure compliance with NFPA 101 was achieved. For buildings where this was not possible a performance based approach was adopted and alternative solutions were developed.