The assessment of major hazard: a model for fatal injury from burns

The assessment of the hazard of major fire events creates a requirement for a relationship between the thermal load and the probability of fatal injury. For many years use has been made of a probit equation derived from burn injuries due to nuclear weapons. There is also now a version of this relation modified to allow for the difference between radiation from a nuclear event and that from a hydrocarbon fire. We describe a quite different model constructed from the various relevant features including the human response, the effective incident radiation, the protection afforded by clothing, the ignition of clothing, the severity of burns and the medical treatment of burns