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Much is talked about fire risk assessments but what are the kinds of issues that are involved? Kate Gardner guides us through a practical risk assessment – discussing typical scenarios in offices, warehouses and factories – to highlight the common, and not so common, dangers.
Who needs to carry out a fire risk assessment?
Fire risk assessments need to be carried out by the responsible person. That can be the person who is designated as the health and safety or facilities/premises manager; it could be the owner of the building; it could be the person who is actually in control of part of the premises. So it’s quite a wide-ranging remit and it’s down to individuals to make sure they recognise and identify who their responsible people are.
Are employers ever surprised about the extent of their fire risks?
I think sometimes they are, particularly in low risk offices. They recognise they have computers and paper or other combustible materials in the workplace but they don’t necessarily realise that, if they have had IT work done, contractors may have left holes in the building structure that might actually impact on their safety. Storage and housekeeping issues, blocked fire exits or a general lack of awareness by staff on safe evacuation procedures can also be overlooked.
Is a robust fire risk assessment a fool-proof fire deterrent?
No. While your fire risk assessment is an important tool, you are only ever as good as your weakest link. So if your weakest link happens to be your members of staff who don’t understand what their requirements are and don’t recognise the issues relevant to fire safety, your risk assessment is valueless. You may have a really robust policy in place, supported by a detailed risk assessment, but if you haven’t trained your staff in their roles and responsibilities, then you are potentially leaving yourself open to disaster.
What could happen to an employer who hasn’t carried out a fire risk assessment?
You could receive a visit from your local fire enforcement officer, which could potentially end up with a prosecution if you have failed to carry out a robust or full fire risk assessment. That prosecution can lead to either fines, imprisonment or in some cases both. If the fire enforcing officers who visit believe there to be a significant risk, then they have the ability to close your operation immediately, which is obviously going to impact on your viability as an organisation.
One of the biggest issues is keeping your signage visible and up to date. Is this a common problem?
You tend to find that in a lot of low risk environments the fire doors have sufficient fire exit signs. If it is a small office and there are only one or two doors or obvious exits, that may be sufficient. The problems occur where you’ve got storage areas, with tall filing, or you’ve got large office expanses or factories where it may not be obvious where the fire exit is. In a situation like this, it is really important that you put up signage, suspended if necessary from the ceiling, showing the routes that need to be taken. It would not be appropriate just to have them at the final exit points. You need to be telling people where those exits are from various points within the working environment.
A similar problem can occur with emergency exits – they’re only used in an emergency, so they’re quite often blocked by other items, or forgotten about. Is this something you see quite a lot?
In large organisations where there may be a number of routes, one or two may get blocked with deliveries coming in; if you’ve had office moves at the weekend it’s possible that someone has stored some things temporarily where they block or obscure exit routes. However, often the temporary becomes more permanent – boxes breed boxes – so it’s really important that poor housekeeping is attended to. The other thing to bear in mind is it may not be you or your employees who are actually causing the blocked exits. In a number of tenanted buildings where the fire door exits out into a car park, it’s possible that your final building exit may be blocked by somebody parking a car across it. So, part of the process is to carry out checks on your final exit points out of the building to make sure that they remain clear at all times.
Fire doors being propped open allow fire and smoke to rapidly spread throughout a building. What are the main issues here?
Fire doors are there to protect you, your staff and your premises from fire. They are designed to have a minimum of 30 minutes’ fire protection to stop the fire from spreading significantly further, giving you a chance to get your people out of the building or to protect the area with additional support from the fire brigade. So if they’re left open, smoke and fire can spread very rapidly. Smoke does an incredible amount of damage and that in itself can have a significant impact on how you’re able to operate within your building. So fire doors really need to be kept shut; that’s what they’re there to do.
Poor construction can lead to buildings having weak spots that will allow fire and smoke to spread unchecked. In what particular buildings do you see this occurring?
You often find this problem occurring in older buildings where there have been lots of renovations carried out. Over the years, voids have appeared around the building that people don’t necessarily know are there, and they can often be a source for fire. Even in the most modern, up-to-date building where you have had some retro-fit work carried out requiring holes to be drilled through fire protection areas, if that hole is then not properly fire-stopped, you are allowing the fire and the smoke to spread much more easily. So it comes down to the type of environment that the building is. The older building, with more nooks and crannies that have been built into it by the various users, or a 15-year-old building that has been changed for use – these can all have areas that allow smoke and fire to spread without you necessarily being aware of what’s there.
It is a legal requirement to display fire notices to give instructions in the event of a fire. What are the main issues that people get wrong?
You often find that the information on the fire action notice is actually not what is in the fire emergency evacuation plan. For instance, it may be that you need to dial ‘9’, for an outside line, before you actually dial for the fire brigade. If this is not correctly communicated on the fire action notices, delays in contacting the emergency services can result. It’s also important that adequate training and information are provided to staff and building users. These fire notices tell people what they should be doing in the event of a fire, but you also need to make sure that all of your staff know what these messages are. Do you want your untrained members of staff fighting fires with portable equipment? Do you only want your trained members of staff to do that? You also need to make sure that emergency signs and diagrams are as current and up-to-date as your emergency evacuation plans. Importantly, if you’re in shared occupancy space or in a building where building work or maintenance work is going on where the normal routine that you would follow is disrupted for any reason – for example a staircase may be taken out, or there may be a different location point that you have to go to – this information must be communicated quickly and efficiently to keep everybody properly informed. These are things that need to be covered in the fire emergency evacuation plan.
Combustible materials are anything that can contribute to a fire, so can be found in most workplaces and premises managers need to take extra care where these materials are stored. What are the main precautions a manager can take?
Think about what you are storing, why you are storing it and how much you are storing? Do you have an arson issue in the area? Are you just allowing combustibles to accumulate in various points around the location without thought as to what they’re being stored in? Have you got the right types of bins and are they big enough? Are they lockable and secure so you don’t have arsonists using them as a source of fuel? In an office you may be storing paper, stationery and consumables, but do you really need to have the vast departmental stationery mountains which develop if there is no centralised purchasing policy. We all know that while we try to reduce the amount of paper that we use, paper is part of modern office life – whether it’s storage of documents or printed materials that you use on a day-to-day basis. So think about where the paper – be it recycled paper waiting for collection or the documents that you are storing on site – are held in relation to sources of heat or areas that could cause a problem. Really, a lot of it is down to managing your workspace, managing your housekeeping and encouraging people to think about the way they store things. Challenge items being stored under desks, around foot wells, in cupboards under stairs – all of these areas, if they’re not actively managed and you don’t have good robust housekeeping procedures in place, can become a real hazard, especially if you haven’t got a robust procedure in place for checking who owns the documents that are distributed around your building.
Equipment should be checked on a regular basis to ensure it is fit for purpose and won’t cause or contribute to a fire. What are the main issues surrounding this?
Basically, a piece of kit that you provide at work should be fit for purpose. It should be in a good state of repair and it shouldn’t be putting your business at risk, so the things to be looking out for are damaged cables that get pinched between the floor boxes and evidence of scorching or burning on the outside casing of equipment. We’re all very reliant on IT, computers and other electrically-generated pieces of kit around the building; if these aren’t managed properly – if the plugs are damaged, or if the cables are allowed to overheat, or if you daisy-chain too many electrical cables together – these are all areas that can generate heat. If you’ve got pieces of equipment that can generate sparks, or you’ve got defective switchgear where the casing around the incoming electrical switchgear is actually broken, this is a significant hazard, because it allows people to come into contact with the electricity. So from a health and safety point of view that is not something that we would encourage, but also it’s a source of electricity that could generate sparks and heat and can therefore be the cause of your fire. Once a fire starts it can take hold very quickly, so keeping an eye on equipment that is out of action is really important, as is having a good procedure in place for reporting it.
A lot of hazards are very obvious and easily identified. What other, less obvious, hazards, need to be watched out for?
We’ve already mentioned damaged cables but I challenge you to look under your desks and see how many cables you have got pinched in your floor boxes. As a facilities manager, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking under people’s desks, trying to encourage them to maintain the safety and integrity of their cables. Also, look in the floor boxes themselves – how many times do they actually get cleaned? This build-up of dust and lint can actually be a source of ignition if it’s not managed properly. Your computers generate a huge amount of heat but how many of them have got the vents blocked, either by items being stacked around them, or items being stacked on top of monitors, or on top of printer equipment? Where you store paper in relation to where the printers are is important – ventilation panels can get incredibly hot, and can allow the machine to overheat. Microwaves in office kitchens are another heat source that tend to get forgotten about. Again, the vents on the top get blocked and people do misuse this equipment.
In a manufacturing environment, with equipment or machinery that is being used on a regular basis, there is often a build-up of dust and excess grease. All of these things, if they’re not routinely removed from the machine as part of your planned preventative maintenance programme, can build up and can cause problems with the machine, so ensure you have good maintenance and housekeeping systems in place. You also need to train people to understand and recognise that some of these hazards are caused because of the things we fail to do.
Kate Gardner is Workplace Law Group’s business manager in health, safety and facilities management.
SPECIAL REPORT – SPECIAL OFFER
This article is taken from Workplace Law Group’s Fire Safety 2009: Special Report – Comprehensive research and guidance on meeting your responsibilities under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order, published in August 2008. The Report explains fire safety law in detail and provides an analysis of case law under the new legislation in comparison with the old, using real-life examples to highlight its importance. Fire Safety 2009 is aimed at employers, managers, occupiers and owners of all premises, who need to understand how the consolidation of fire safety management will affect their business.
Readers of FSE can claim 10% off the published price by calling
[
Much is talked about fire risk assessments but what are the kinds of issues that are involved? Kate Gardner guides us through a practical risk assessment – discussing typical scenarios in offices, warehouses and factories – to highlight the common, and not so common, dangers.
Who needs to carry out a fire risk assessment?
Fire risk assessments need to be carried out by the responsible person. That can be the person who is designated as the health and safety or facilities/premises manager; it could be the owner of the building; it could be the person who is actually in control of part of the premises. So it’s quite a wide-ranging remit and it’s down to individuals to make sure they recognise and identify who their responsible people are.
Are employers ever surprised about the extent of their fire risks?
I think sometimes they are, particularly in low risk offices. They recognise they have computers and paper or other combustible materials in the workplace but they don’t necessarily realise that, if they have had IT work done, contractors may have left holes in the building structure that might actually impact on their safety. Storage and housekeeping issues, blocked fire exits or a general lack of awareness by staff on safe evacuation procedures can also be overlooked.
Is a robust fire risk assessment a fool-proof fire deterrent?
No. While your fire risk assessment is an important tool, you are only ever as good as your weakest link. So if your weakest link happens to be your members of staff who don’t understand what their requirements are and don’t recognise the issues relevant to fire safety, your risk assessment is valueless. You may have a really robust policy in place, supported by a detailed risk assessment, but if you haven’t trained your staff in their roles and responsibilities, then you are potentially leaving yourself open to disaster.
What could happen to an employer who hasn’t carried out a fire risk assessment?
You could receive a visit from your local fire enforcement officer, which could potentially end up with a prosecution if you have failed to carry out a robust or full fire risk assessment. That prosecution can lead to either fines, imprisonment or in some cases both. If the fire enforcing officers who visit believe there to be a significant risk, then they have the ability to close your operation immediately, which is obviously going to impact on your viability as an organisation.
One of the biggest issues is keeping your signage visible and up to date. Is this a common problem?
You tend to find that in a lot of low risk environments the fire doors have sufficient fire exit signs. If it is a small office and there are only one or two doors or obvious exits, that may be sufficient. The problems occur where you’ve got storage areas, with tall filing, or you’ve got large office expanses or factories where it may not be obvious where the fire exit is. In a situation like this, it is really important that you put up signage, suspended if necessary from the ceiling, showing the routes that need to be taken. It would not be appropriate just to have them at the final exit points. You need to be telling people where those exits are from various points within the working environment.
A similar problem can occur with emergency exits – they’re only used in an emergency, so they’re quite often blocked by other items, or forgotten about. Is this something you see quite a lot?
In large organisations where there may be a number of routes, one or two may get blocked with deliveries coming in; if you’ve had office moves at the weekend it’s possible that someone has stored some things temporarily where they block or obscure exit routes. However, often the temporary becomes more permanent – boxes breed boxes – so it’s really important that poor housekeeping is attended to. The other thing to bear in mind is it may not be you or your employees who are actually causing the blocked exits. In a number of tenanted buildings where the fire door exits out into a car park, it’s possible that your final building exit may be blocked by somebody parking a car across it. So, part of the process is to carry out checks on your final exit points out of the building to make sure that they remain clear at all times.
Fire doors being propped open allow fire and smoke to rapidly spread throughout a building. What are the main issues here?
Fire doors are there to protect you, your staff and your premises from fire. They are designed to have a minimum of 30 minutes’ fire protection to stop the fire from spreading significantly further, giving you a chance to get your people out of the building or to protect the area with additional support from the fire brigade. So if they’re left open, smoke and fire can spread very rapidly. Smoke does an incredible amount of damage and that in itself can have a significant impact on how you’re able to operate within your building. So fire doors really need to be kept shut; that’s what they’re there to do.
Poor construction can lead to buildings having weak spots that will allow fire and smoke to spread unchecked. In what particular buildings do you see this occurring?
You often find this problem occurring in older buildings where there have been lots of renovations carried out. Over the years, voids have appeared around the building that people don’t necessarily know are there, and they can often be a source for fire. Even in the most modern, up-to-date building where you have had some retro-fit work carried out requiring holes to be drilled through fire protection areas, if that hole is then not properly fire-stopped, you are allowing the fire and the smoke to spread much more easily. So it comes down to the type of environment that the building is. The older building, with more nooks and crannies that have been built into it by the various users, or a 15-year-old building that has been changed for use – these can all have areas that allow smoke and fire to spread without you necessarily being aware of what’s there.
It is a legal requirement to display fire notices to give instructions in the event of a fire. What are the main issues that people get wrong?
You often find that the information on the fire action notice is actually not what is in the fire emergency evacuation plan. For instance, it may be that you need to dial ‘9′, for an outside line, before you actually dial for the fire brigade. If this is not correctly communicated on the fire action notices, delays in contacting the emergency services can result. It’s also important that adequate training and information are provided to staff and building users. These fire notices tell people what they should be doing in the event of a fire, but you also need to make sure that all of your staff know what these messages are. Do you want your untrained members of staff fighting fires with portable equipment? Do you only want your trained members of staff to do that? You also need to make sure that emergency signs and diagrams are as current and up-to-date as your emergency evacuation plans. Importantly, if you’re in shared occupancy space or in a building where building work or maintenance work is going on where the normal routine that you would follow is disrupted for any reason – for example a staircase may be taken out, or there may be a different location point that you have to go to – this information must be communicated quickly and efficiently to keep everybody properly informed. These are things that need to be covered in the fire emergency evacuation plan.
Combustible materials are anything that can contribute to a fire, so can be found in most workplaces and premises managers need to take extra care where these materials are stored. What are the main precautions a manager can take?
Think about what you are storing, why you are storing it and how much you are storing? Do you have an arson issue in the area? Are you just allowing combustibles to accumulate in various points around the location without thought as to what they’re being stored in? Have you got the right types of bins and are they big enough? Are they lockable and secure so you don’t have arsonists using them as a source of fuel? In an office you may be storing paper, stationery and consumables, but do you really need to have the vast departmental stationery mountains which develop if there is no centralised purchasing policy. We all know that while we try to reduce the amount of paper that we use, paper is part of modern office life – whether it’s storage of documents or printed materials that you use on a day-to-day basis. So think about where the paper – be it recycled paper waiting for collection or the documents that you are storing on site – are held in relation to sources of heat or areas that could cause a problem. Really, a lot of it is down to managing your workspace, managing your housekeeping and encouraging people to think about the way they store things. Challenge items being stored under desks, around foot wells, in cupboards under stairs – all of these areas, if they’re not actively managed and you don’t have good robust housekeeping procedures in place, can become a real hazard, especially if you haven’t got a robust procedure in place for checking who owns the documents that are distributed around your building.
Equipment should be checked on a regular basis to ensure it is fit for purpose and won’t cause or contribute to a fire. What are the main issues surrounding this?
Basically, a piece of kit that you provide at work should be fit for purpose. It should be in a good state of repair and it shouldn’t be putting your business at risk, so the things to be looking out for are damaged cables that get pinched between the floor boxes and evidence of scorching or burning on the outside casing of equipment. We’re all very reliant on IT, computers and other electrically-generated pieces of kit around the building; if these aren’t managed properly – if the plugs are damaged, or if the cables are allowed to overheat, or if you daisy-chain too many electrical cables together – these are all areas that can generate heat. If you’ve got pieces of equipment that can generate sparks, or you’ve got defective switchgear where the casing around the incoming electrical switchgear is actually broken, this is a significant hazard, because it allows people to come into contact with the electricity. So from a health and safety point of view that is not something that we would encourage, but also it’s a source of electricity that could generate sparks and heat and can therefore be the cause of your fire. Once a fire starts it can take hold very quickly, so keeping an eye on equipment that is out of action is really important, as is having a good procedure in place for reporting it.
A lot of hazards are very obvious and easily identified. What other, less obvious, hazards, need to be watched out for?
We’ve already mentioned damaged cables but I challenge you to look under your desks and see how many cables you have got pinched in your floor boxes. As a facilities manager, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking under people’s desks, trying to encourage them to maintain the safety and integrity of their cables. Also, look in the floor boxes themselves – how many times do they actually get cleaned? This build-up of dust and lint can actually be a source of ignition if it’s not managed properly. Your computers generate a huge amount of heat but how many of them have got the vents blocked, either by items being stacked around them, or items being stacked on top of monitors, or on top of printer equipment? Where you store paper in relation to where the printers are is important – ventilation panels can get incredibly hot, and can allow the machine to overheat. Microwaves in office kitchens are another heat source that tend to get forgotten about. Again, the vents on the top get blocked and people do misuse this equipment.
In a manufacturing environment, with equipment or machinery that is being used on a regular basis, there is often a build-up of dust and excess grease. All of these things, if they’re not routinely removed from the machine as part of your planned preventative maintenance programme, can build up and can cause problems with the machine, so ensure you have good maintenance and housekeeping systems in place. You also need to train people to understand and recognise that some of these hazards are caused because of the things we fail to do.
Kate Gardner is Workplace Law Group’s business manager in health, safety and facilities management.
SPECIAL REPORT – SPECIAL OFFER
This article is taken from Workplace Law Group’s Fire Safety 2009: Special Report – Comprehensive research and guidance on meeting your responsibilities under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order, published in August 2008. The Report explains fire safety law in detail and provides an analysis of case law under the new legislation in comparison with the old, using real-life examples to highlight its importance. Fire Safety 2009 is aimed at employers, managers, occupiers and owners of all premises, who need to understand how the consolidation of fire safety management will affect their business.
Readers of FSE can claim 10% off the published price by calling