Fire Door Safety Week (Sept. 16-21) will feature a series of events to raise awareness of fire doors being engineered safety devices, not just doors. Around 3 million fire doors are installed in the UK alone every single year, but a huge number of them are either badly installed or are misused by being held open. A recent fire risk assessor survey showed that 80 percent of escape routes are obstructed. Sixty-five percent of fire doors are wedged open, and 85 percent had their door closers disconnected.
Fire Door Safety Week aims to tackle some of the ambivalent behaviour toward fire doors and escape routes with a week of events, including a fire door test that will be streamed live on the Internet. The test is being carried out by BM Trada — the new name for Chiltern International Fire since July 1st, in case you were wondering — but you’ll need to email Charlotte Rutt at [email protected] to get access to the password-protected link. Two identical doors will be subjected to fire. One will be incorrectly installed and specified in order to show the dangers of a poor fire door installation in real-time.
Other events will include a series of ASFP regional seminars focused on understanding passive fire protection and a free training day for members of the Building Merchants Federation on how to become an Approved Fire Door Centre.
As a part of FIREX International, IFSEC Global.com is backing Fire Door Safety Week, and we would encourage you to do the same. You can download a toolkit for supporting the awareness-raising events yourself. We’re also interested in what you think. Will this initiative make any difference? Will it spread any awareness, or will the week pass the wider public by?
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Thanks for the support, I hope others will follow suit. As BWF-CERTIFIRE we decided to set this initiative up to rally the industry together and it is great to see the messages of support coming in. Will it make a difference, we certainly hope so, will it stand more of a chance if making a difference if the whole industry get behind it – absolutely. If you haven’t already, please pledge your support through the website http://www.firedoorsafetyweek.co.uk.
Iain McIlweeCEO BWF
I wish you all the best of luck with this important campaign,
I must say that it reminds me of the Theodore Firedoor page (Facebook).
This video (Youtube) from July this year shows some classic examples of installation issues which hopefully this campaign will aim to reduce.
That’s cool. Shame it’s only got 188 likes, but that can only really grow, I suppose.
Yes, we’d encourage people to get behind it! Thanks Iain.
Lets all get behind this campaign. There is so much useful information and education available from authorative sources to make sure fire doors are correctly installed, inspected, maintained and repaired. The challenge is to get it out to the installers/maintainers/responsible persons.
The more of us get behind the campaign and spread the word then the safer our public buildings will be.
Follow Theodore Firedoor at Facebook and Twitter and check out fire doors wherever you go. He is looking for evidence all the time!
Also check out http://www.fdis.co.uk
Good old Theodore, thanks Neil.
I am fully
supporting your campaign. One more comment
to: ‘A huge number of fire doors are badly
installed’. Indeed, in the UK doors are tested
either
without the letterplate or with the letterplate
specifically closed off. These very same doors are then often
used on exit routes as fire doors with a letterplate.
The quality assurance of the fire door with an unprotected letterplate collapses
at the point of installation and use.
Surely a large percentage of fire doors don’t have a letter plate? Your average building has one front door (with a letter plate) a rear door, and several internal doors (all without a letter plate). Fire doors are for stopping the spread of fire in a building. A letterplated door is likely only to lead outside I’d have thought