Fire Door Safety Week: So How did it Go?

John Fletcher, BWF-CERTIFIRE scheme manager, tells IFSEC Global that the second edition of Fire Door Safety Week reached twice as many people as the inaugural edition.

IFSEC Global: So how did Fire Safety Week go then?

John Fletcher: We’ve used it to go right across the industry and we all say the same thing really, irrespective of what scheme we belong too.

I thought it was very good. The number of supporters was significantly higher than last year – and that was right across not just our industry, but other industries and users. We far more than doubled the number of visitors compared to last year. So we were very happy with that.

We had a good response from people who attended our first event on Monday, the main intention of which was too get our message across on fire safety in conjunction with London Fire Brigade, across to a spectrum of users, contractors, facilities managers and housing providers.

We started off with a live fire door test because of what our inspectors tell us about the quality of workmanship of fire doors and their users. We also had experts from the industry to provide people with solutions to that, the role of intumescent seals – which is often misunderstood – and how in depth fire door inspection needs to be, particularly in respect of the RRO or FSO [Fire Safety Order]. And those messages are available on our website.

And we had quite a few other events too right throughout the week. That was reflected in the Twitter feeds we monitored too.

Measuring response in the number of people joining in it was very good and picking up the main messages and repeating those messages.

IG: So what was the strategy with getting the message across?

JF: We wanted to get a lot of information out but keep it simple – we can easily overcomplicate fire doors. One of those is keeping it closed in the first place, not propping it open. And a lot of messages on Twitter were saying precisely that and helping users know who to report it to.

And did it get the message across well do you think?

JF: I’ve just been looking at stats for the YouTube feed on the fire door video. At the  beginning of the week we had about 50 viewings and this morning we’re up to 1,672 so we’ve had quite a few people looking at that and had a lot of people saying “can we use that video?” So it seems to get the message across.

IG: So why is fire door safety so important?

JF: It’s important because people tend to take fire doors for granted. People tend to think they’re an ordinary door.

It has to be part of building’s built-in passive fire protection, which was exemplified by the sad story of the woman who died in a fire simply because a door had been propped open and the mother did interviews with the BBC to strike home what can happen if we ignore things because we don’t think its ever going to happen to us.

We’re all guilty sometimes – how often do we all check into a hotel and not read the instructions?

That opened our eyes in a way that we had to help people understand that this is a serious issue.

And throughout last week there were a number of incidents where the fire brigade were called out and were were reliant on the doors being in working order. There were two or three flat fires like that last week – no one was killed, fortunately.

IG: Any new plans for next year yet?

JF: Not yet. This week we’re taking stock and we have a marketing committee who we will report to. We want to reach the smaller installers, contractors and developers to make sure they get it right and understand why they need to get it right.

So we need to take stock on whether we got that message across to them and if so, how well we did that. So we’ll be measuring that this week and into October.

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