Officially opened on 31March 2012, the building was designed around many maritime themes including the ship's hull.
With large numbers of the public expected, and their safety a priority (as well as that of the staff), it was decided that a reliable voice evacuation system must be installed.
In addition to the voice evacuation, a disabled refuge and toilet alarm system was also needed for the site. This type of system provides two way communication between building management and areas of refuge for those that would need assistance during an evacuation.
DJ Kilpatrick (DJK) of Belfast was chosen by G4S Fire Security as the supplier for both types of system and they opted to use products from UK manufacturer Baldwin Boxall. The structure of the building is complex - not a single right angle is in view throughout the attraction. DJK, working closely with Baldwin Boxall, designed the voice evacuation system to ensure speech intelligibility was high in all areas. Careful thought was needed regarding the placement of the Penton loudspeakers, as there had been concern about potential over flow within certain areas, especially the atrium.
An eight zone centralised voice evacuation system provides phased evacuation to all areas of the attraction. Inputs to the system include background music, localised paging microphones, multi-zone microphones and all call fire microphones. Sitting at the heart of the system is Baldwin Boxall's well established DSP router the BVRD2M.
The system employs DC line monitoring technology which is one of three monitoring solutions offered by Baldwin Boxall (the BVRDADIM). The Penton loudspeakers were supplied with capacitors and by doing this the BVRDADIM allows one amplifier to drive two loudspeaker circuits. If one circuit should suffer a short circuit the BVRADIM will isolate the affected circuit and allow the other circuit to function with only a slight drop in level. The system has amplifier redundancy and is battery backed as standard.
VIGIL Omnicare was the preferred disabled refuge/toilet alarm system and two separate systems were installed. The first was a six-way system for the car parks with the second being a larger, 46-way system, for the attraction.
G4S Fire Security, the installation company, was extremely happy with the ease of the installation and the service given by DJK. Their project manager Gary Graham commented, "From the start of the project we have been delighted with the service provided by DJK. By choosing Baldwin Boxall equipment we were safe in the knowledge that we were installing quality equipment. The end result is we have a voice evacuation system that allows our client to make paging announcements/message broadcasts knowing they will be clearly heard by the general public and staff."
Jim Hooks, managing director of DJ Kilpatrick said, "DJK has been a distributor for Baldwin Boxall for over 15 years and this is another successful project for us using their products. The team at Baldwin Boxall were effective with their design and all round assistance with this project."
There will be more coverage of Titanic Belfast in the June 2012 issue of LSI - out soon. (Jim Evans)
