Federal Law No. 123-FZ - Technical Regulation on Fire Safety Requirements

Federal Law of the Russian Federation No. 123-FZ of 22 July 2008

Unofficial summary, not a translation of the full text. This page states what the act regulates and whom it binds; it does not reproduce its provisions. Only the Russian original published in the official sources of the Russian Federation has legal force.

What it regulates

The Law is the technical regulation on fire safety. It fixes the minimum mandatory fire safety requirements for protected objects - buildings, structures, industrial facilities and fire-technical products. Much of its text is classification: fires and hazardous fire factors, substances and materials by fire and explosion hazard, process media, hazardous zones, and buildings by fire resistance and functional fire hazard. On that base it sets requirements for fire prevention and fire protection systems, permitted fire risk, the fire safety declaration and conformity assessment.

Whom it binds

Its provisions bind at design, construction, capital repair, reconstruction, technical re-equipment, change of functional purpose, maintenance, operation and disposal of protected objects, and when technical documentation for them is drawn up. Owners and other lawful possessors answer for the object. Special-purpose objects, among them military, nuclear and mining sites, meet these requirements together with the separate acts written for them.

Key duties

Every protected object shall have a fire safety system built from fire prevention, fire protection and organisational and technical measures.
That system shall exclude any excess over the permitted fire risk and shall prevent harm to third parties from a fire.
Fire safety counts as ensured where the Law is met in full and one further condition holds, such as compliance with fire safety normative documents or fire risk kept within the permitted value.
Individual fire risk in a building shall not exceed one in a million per year for a person at the point furthest from the exit.
A fire safety declaration shall be drawn up for objects whose design documentation goes through expert review, and updated within a year of reconstruction or technical re-equipment.
Design solutions shall provide for evacuation to a safe zone, rescue of people, access for fire crews, delivery of extinguishing agents and no spread of fire to neighbouring buildings.
Protected objects and products shall pass conformity assessment in the forms the Law lists, among them declaring, certification, independent fire risk assessment and state fire supervision.

Relevance to permit-to-work

The Law does not mention permits to work and sets no procedure for authorising a job. It regulates the object, not the work: classes, limits, design solutions and conformity assessment. What it offers a permit system is input data rather than procedure - the category of premises by explosion and fire hazard, the class of a hazardous zone, and the permitted fire risk. Permit rules for hot work are not part of this Law.