Guidelines (("Guidelines on alternative design and arrangements for fire safety", MSC/Circ.1002, June 2001)) forapplying Fire Risk Analysis ((FRA)) to alternative ship designs have been included in the international safety regulations.The aim of the SAFETY FIRST project is to develop and demonstrate a tried and tested "toolkit" for carrying out firerisk assessment for ships in accordance with Part F Regulation 17 of the new SOLAS Chapter II-2 and with theGuidelines.The Safety First project includes the collection and development of data and probabilistic models which could be usedfor assessing the fire risk associated with an alternative ship design. Probabilistic models have been developed for threecase studies, namely a passenger cabin fire, a fire in a three-deck atrium, and a fire/explosion in the parking deck of a roropassenger ferry.These models generally use data on real fires and on the reliability of fire protection measures, and include statistical,probabilistic models concerned with fire/smoke spread and damage. Quantifying uncertainties by probabilities, thesemodels provide a quantitative evaluation of fire risk and effectiveness of fire safety measures in probabilistic terms.Following a review of Fire Risk Assessment techniques, standard fire models, consisting of fault trees and event trees,have been developed for the case studies. They aim at describing the relevant factors that can have influence on firedevelopment and the spread of fire/smoke within and through ship space((s)).An estimate of the frequency of occurrence of fire outbreaks ((in terms of fire events per ship per year)) for "All Ships","Passenger Ships" and "Ro-Ro Ships" categories has been provided for several ships compartments by processing twoextracts of the Lloyds database, the first restricted to the EU Fleet and the second including the World Fleet. Theseestimates can be used to characterise the frequency of occurrence of the initiating events of event trees.Finally, failure statistics data for the main components of the on board fire protection systems, including fire detection((e.g. failure of smoke detectors or alarms)), fire containment ((e.g. failure of automatic closure of fire doors)) and fireextinction ((e.g. failure of sprinkler)) have been collected from other industrial sectors and from shipbuilders, equipmentmanufacturers and parts suppliers.