Opal Court – Student Accommodation

Overview

IQ Student Accommodation is an accommodation provider that houses over 28,000 students across 67 different sites in the UK. Student experience is the priority at IQ, which is achieved through the quality of the living environment, and a focus on creating a community. One of the sites provided by IQ is Opal Court, which was built in 2003 for students attending university in Leicester.  

Brief –  

Opal Court required compartmentation to works to update the building and ensure it adhered to regulations. With 121 cluster flats and 15 storeys, this was a large project to bring the building into line with the regulations in place.  

Situation

Fire safety works in the building needed to be brought in line with the fire strategy of the building to meet the building regulations. At the beginning of this project, the survey team and consultants collaborated to carry out an intrusive inspection of the building, and we worked with the Building Management team for Opal Court in order to review the existing drawings, which highlighted the requirement for remedial works.  

Solution

Over 50 technicians were deployed on site, and the programming and access arrangements were completed by the contract management team. This was also assisted by the contract support team to keep an efficient schedule. The team carried out a passive fire protection inspection to make observations on the firestopping works in place. In doing so, a lack of compliance was found, such as the corridor walls needed to be constructed to FR30 and the door frames needing to be sealed with a correct fire stop detail. Conducting this survey allowed GTS to recommend the best actions moving forwards, as one of the key suggestions was a fully survey on compartment doors as deficiencies were found across multiple doors, and the quality of the doors were varied and inconsistent.  

The Global team updated the internal FR30, FR60 and FR90 walls, as well as the 120FR floors. In doing so, the compartmentation and fire resistance was brought into compliance. All the work had to be completed to a standard against the manufacturer’s test details, and a third party approved the works under the FIRAS scheme upon completion for passive fire protection works to be certain that the building meets regulations.  

Results –  

• Updated FR30, FR60 and FR90 walls  

• Updated 120FR floors  

• Compliant compartmentation and fire resistance  

Summary

The results of Globa’s remedial works of the passive fire protection works to ensured that Opal Court met building regulations by updating the walls and floors to improve the fire resistance of the accommodation. By using an efficient approach and creating high standard of work, Global has now been appointed as the fire safety contractor across more of IQ’s properties.