Fire Risk

Fire fighting skills can be gained through short training courses.

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Assess the risk right and you can fight fires the best way possible: through prevention.

The risk of fire is a threat to all buildings, regardless of age or size. While the condition of a building will inevitably influence how fire safe it is, a good risk assessment, clear fire safety plan, the right equipment and well-trained people will all mitigate the danger.

Prevention is obviously better than any cure and many fires can be avoided through the right precautions. If a fire does break out, the effects can be minimised by having effective controls and procedures in place.

Start by knowing who is in charge. If, as an FM, you are not taking personal responsibility for fire safety, know who is. If you are delegating the responsibility, pick more than one person, but make sure you have clearly assigned duties.

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It’s obvious that those chosen need to be able to cooperate with each other, as well as communicate clearly with other interested parties, such as the building’s occupants. But they also need to be aware of and able to deal with the serious responsibility, taking care that everyone who uses the premises, would be able to escape in the case of a fire, or other building-related emergency.

While the majority of people who may be in a building will be able to manage by themselves, consideration needs to be given to everyone who might be on your premises, including employees, visitors or members of the public. Particular attention will have to be paid to anyone who may need special help, such as elderly or disabled people, or children.

A thorough risk assessment is the first step. If it’s something you or your colleagues have not done before or are unfamiliar with, get professional help. In many premises achieving fire safety is likely to be a matter of common sense, providing the responsible people make enough time available to go through all the necessary steps.

A risk assessment is a process driven exercise that starts by identifying hazards. Hazards are simply anything that may start a fire, such as naked flames, heaters or commercial fixtures, such as cookers or hot-air dryers.

Anything that can burn should also be considered in the risk assessment. This can include piles of waste, display materials, textiles or other flammable products. Things that may intensify the fire, such as sources of oxygen from air conditioning, medical products or commercial oxygen supplies must also be considered and accounted for in any actions.

The people most at risk from the hazards need to be identified. These include those who work close to, or with, the hazards in question and people who work alone, or in isolated areas.

Once you know what the hazard is and who is at risk from it, the next step is to remove or reduce it as much as possible. That means shifting the piles of waste, replacing flammable materials with safer alternatives and keeping anything that can start a fire away from things that can burn.

It’s worth a note here about asbestos. This is still being used in some Gulf building projects. So let’s be clear, it is not a safe alternative material. If it’s already in your building it should be removed, by experts.

With risks reduced as much as possible, you are then left with the process of introducing safety measures to counter the risks that remain.