The city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is home to 3.3 million people, and the world’s longest driverless single metro line – the Dubai Metro.
Designed to take up to 13,380 passengers an hour on its green line, and 11,675 passengers an hour on its red line at peak time, the Metro of almost 75 km is operated by RTA and Serco. Under contract to the Dubai Roads & Transport Authority, the network is run by some 2000 staff and has 57 trains running at peak times.
Dafoos Fire and Security were commissioned for the fire detection installation on the Metro. Dafoos commissions and maintains active and passive fire protection systems, and partners with OEMs including Hochiki.
As tens of thousands of passengers use the network daily and the Metro operates in a hot and sandy region, any false alarm could cause disruption and cost the operator financially, especially during peak service times. The company’s Marketing Director, Vijay Chandran said: “it was especially important as part of the life safety system design process to negate false alarms. Hochiki fire detection devices were chosen as they have a reputation for being the best in the market for their quality and their reliability when it comes to false alarm reduction. Our selection of Hochiki was confidently backed by the operators RTA and Serco”.
The Hochiki sensors were to be installed inside the metro and tram coaches; a sensitive area when thousands of people are transiting at a time, and posing a higher chance of triggering false alarms. Any fire alarm trigger was programmed to send a command to the central station, and this would halt the operations within the network until the problem is rectified.
The Hochiki technical team also worked with Dafoos to negate the frequent dust build up in the chambers. It was advised that periodic maintenance of the sensors was moved from every six months to every two, as customary practice for commercial buildings in the region.
Vijay Chandran said: “Hochiki Smoke Sensors have been installed across the entire Dubai Metro and tram coaches; they have been functioning with minimal issues for the last three years. Periodic maintenance has been conducted with Hochiki’s technical team recommendation. Our team would not hesitate to recommend Hochiki life safety systems and products to be used in other projects within the transport industry.”
