Fire Safety – the things we see (Part 5)

Here is this week’s round up of things spotted when doing fire safety visits. I have started with something fairly mundane but, nevertheless, important: wedged fire doors. On many occasions, people tell me that they need to have the door wedged open because ___________ (fill in the blanks with a plausible, if not well thought out excuse/reason).

This may look something like this:

Other times, fire extinguishers have been brought in to act as the door wedge – not a nice situation to be explaining or justifying to the fire officer!

On other occasions, the problem may be created by other people (such as contractors) in areas that should form a vital part to the fire safety and compartmentation of the building:

Solutions?

Solutions?

Several solutions present themselves:

• walk the site and find the problem areas (active management)
• carry out (or review) a fire risk assessment
• remove the wedges
• educate employees about fire door and fire safety
• provide door retainers that release when the alarm is sounded if there are areas where doors need to be held open
• get people thinking about fire safety and the spread of smoke and fire