The importance of fire doors is relatively self-evident for those of us who are a part of the life safety industries, but evidence shows that the public doesn’t really understand their importance.
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 crutt@bmtrada.com 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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