How tough is the burden on the ‘responsible person’ likely to be? Very tough according to fire safety consultant Mark Hillier who has the following
tale of caution.
Mr Goodenough was feeling just as his name suggests – content – enjoying the warm, comfortable glow you get when your job is going well. As the new facilities manager for a large office development housing several IT companies, he was confident that the combination of his degree in estate management and his previous job as an assistant site manager at a car manufacturing plant, had equipped him well for his new post.
Mr Goodenough had thrown himself into his new role with enthusiasm. Although built as recently as the 1990s, he was surprised at the poor state of repair and maintenance of some aspects of the building. The office block consisted of three floors, with different tenants on each floor. Each company was currently in the process of updating its IT systems. Although the building had a P1 property protection fire alarm system, it had suffered numerous false alarms and there was also the niggling problem of some of the staff having a crafty fag in the toilets. The system was fully addressable, so he could easily identify where the faults or false alarms were occurring. This was on his agenda for attention as soon as the cabling was completed.
Duty calls
Today, Mr Goodenough was going to get to grips with the air conditioning system that had been playing up over the last two weeks. It was well overdue for a service, but his predecessor had let the maintenance slip due to cost pressures. Everyone was complaining about the system packing up in the middle of summer.
Arriving at work, Mr Goodenough did his normal walk around the building, talking to the workmen on site and seeing what was going on. He had already fallen out with one of the contractors who had left spools of cable and boxes of rubbish in one of the escape stairways, yet the contractor persisted in this. His skip also needed moving as it was located right outside the final exit from the rear of the building. He felt he understood the problems with the means of escape as he had reviewed the fire risk assessment and the fire certificate with the fire officer shortly after his arrival.
Although he had not yet finished re-writing the fire risk assessment and the fire officer had picked up several deficiencies – in particular with the management of the building – he was happy he could sort out the issues.
Some of the fire doors in the building had taken a real battering and some were not closing into their frames, as they had been wedged open and had become warped. But there was no cash in the budget this year to consider replacements and the air conditioning was his biggest priority.
Though Mr Goodenough was conscious of maintaining clear exits and reducing fire hazards in the building, there was pressure to finish the work in two weeks time. He had read in detail the contractors’ risk assessment and method statements and he was reasonably happy with them. They always informed him of any hot work they were carrying out and they kept a fire extinguisher handy at all times. He in turn had kept the managers of each floor informed of any problems or areas of concern throughout, although he got the impression they were only interested in getting their computers back on line.
Feeling satisfied with his morning tour, he returned to his office on the ground floor to pick up his e-mails and review some paperwork. Suddenly the fire alarm sounded. He was not aware of any fire alarm test or practice scheduled for today, so the chances were it was another false alarm – dust had caused the last few alarms where the workmen had forgotten to cover the detector heads while working in the area.
Mr Goodenough went to the fire alarm panel to see where the detector had been activated. It was showing a ground floor detector by stair core 2 and it was not showing a fault. He went into the corridor leading to plant
room 1, but no one was evacuating the building. He assumed this was because the staff had become blase as there had been so many false alarms in the last few weeks. Just as he approached the plant door, he got a call on his management radio to say that a ceiling void detector on the first floor had been activated. He went to open the plant room door but the handle was red hot and he then realised this was for real.
He radioed reception to phone the managers on each floor to confirm a fire and to evacuate the building. He then ran to stair core 2 at the end of the building, but this was already full of smoke and some of the boxes stacked in the stair core were already ablaze. What’s more, the service riser door was open and the cables were melting inside.
People were running towards the stair core as he started to return to reception, so he herded them in that direction and radioed again to ask the receptionist to phone the managers to tell them to avoid using stair 2. It was too late. On the upper floors there was panic, as people flooded into the corridors and tried to escape via staircase 2. When they realised it was full of smoke, they tried to turn against the flow of the escaping crowd. Panic ensued, with several people struggling in the crush. He then rushed to the front entrance and out to the assembly point to see what was happening.
People were pouring out of stair 3 and stair 1 looking very frightened. Smoke was by now coming out of some of the office windows next to stair core 2. On the ground floor, he could not understand why there was smoke coming from the offices at the other end of the building. It had been about 10 minutes since the start of the fire and it was clear that there was total panic, the fire wardens had no accurate record of who was in the building and the registers were not up to date. There were several people suffering from smoke inhalation and some with asthma problems struggling for breath on the grass. The first aiders were doing a good job though.
When the fire brigade arrived, Mr Goodenough went to brief the officer in charge; he explained where the fire had started and that he could not be sure how many people were unaccounted for. Within minutes there were four fire engines on the scene and a fleet of ambulances. Some 20 minutes passed before the fire was under control and several people had been pulled from the building, but luckily only with smoke inhalation. They had been trapped in the offices on the first floor and could not make it to a final exit.
No one had been killed but he couldn’t understand why the fire had spread so quickly. Why had people not been able to escape from the first floor – there were three staircases available after all? He went home, his head swimming with questions and with a heavy heart: what could he have done?
What went wrong?
The fire investigation officer went in the day after the fire and ascertained that seat of the fire was indeed the ground floor plant room, where a contractor had been working on the air conditioning system and had left his blowtorch on during a tea break. The torch had set fire to several boxes, which were being stored by the contractor in the plant area, and then to a flammable liquid solvent, which had caught fire and spread around the plant room. Mr Goodenough had not even known they were even intending to carry out hot work that day.
The spread of fire through the services riser to the stair core had been rapid, as the contractors carrying out the wiring had left the riser doors open and removed the fire stopping. This then ignited bundles of cable and boxes stored in the base of stair 2, which the facilities manager had asked them to remove that very morning. The smoke spread had been rapid as the plant risers were not correctly fire stopped. Where the electrical contractors had widened access through compartment and fire-resistant floors, they had not replaced any fire stopping. This was also made worse by the air conditioning system. The contractor had disconnected the fire alarm interface to some of the air conditioning system, and the smoke had made its way through the open ducts into all of the offices on the first floor. The fire dampers had not activated on all levels and the cavity barriers in the corridors had also not been replaced after the ceiling tiles had been replaced the previous year.
The lack of fire stopping had also led to the rapid movement of smoke, which made it difficult for the fire brigade to locate the source and extent of the fire. Also, those on the first floor had been overcome when they tried to escape, as the corridor was already filling with smoke at both ends. Although they shut the fire door, the smoke seals were not effective as they did not seal against the frame – the result of having been wedged open for many years. The occupants had no option but to open the windows to try and get fresh air, but the negative pressure on the outside of the building caused by the wind sucked the smoke past them while they were struggling for air at the windows.
The original fire stopping and compartmentation on nearly all floors had either been removed, or was ineffective due to the replacement of services over the years. The investigating officer likened the building to a Swiss cheese.
Fact or fiction?
This is obviously a fictitious account, but is it far removed from the bounds of possibility? Many of you will see many more issues raised here than I have included, but what could Mr Goodenough have done to help prevent the problems encountered?
I have studied quite a few fires where the fire spread has been aided by lack of fire stopping, or the provision of fire dampers at walls and floors requiring fire resistance. Often it is the passive fire protection that will cause the biggest problems, although the active systems require greater maintenance and testing.
Firstly don’t let continuous faults occur and be left unresolved on your fire alarm system. Find the faults, find the cause and try and reduce the number of false alarms. If someone is working in an area where the fire alarm needs to be covered, due to the likelihood of dust setting it off, make sure the occupants are aware and are more vigilant than normal. If the fire alarm is there to offer early warning due to increased travel distances to evacuate, is it suitable to allow the area to be occupied if the system is offline?
Ensure that you are fully aware of what walls and floors require fire resistance in your building, and that any workmen know what is required and what must be re-instated. If necessary, inspect all work before it is covered. Some premises have a system similar to that for hot work, where all work on compartment walls and escape routes is given a permit, logged, recorded and inspected each day, especially if the building is in use. This also applies to areas with cavity barriers in ceiling voids – they are also there to help prevent smoke spread.
Once a year, take stock of the condition of fire-resistant doors. Is the self closer effective? Is the smoke seal in situ? Does the door close properly? Is it marked as a fire door and has it been altered or cut? Have the occupants been warned about the result of wedging the door? If it is on a high-use route, then consider using hold-open devices to prevent it being wedged open.
Remember that staircases and corridors are essential for escape and need to be kept clear at all times, which is why they are often designed with 30 minutes’ fire protection. When buildings are designed, the loss of an exit is often taken into account but don’t rely on this.
Ensure that you have an accurate idea of who is in the building at any time, and that the occupants are fully trained in what to do in the event of a fire. This will assist the fire brigade in their search and rescue operations, and may mean the difference between life and death.
People often rely on the active measures in a building to provide adequate protection. But in reality, both passive and active fire precautions are essential to ensure both life safety and property protection. The biggest killer in a fire is smoke and given the chance, it spreads rapidly causing confusion and panic.
Give your staff a fighting chance and look carefully at what work is being carried out and what state your passive measures are in. Just maintaining the fire alarm system is not enough!
Mark Hillier, BSc(hons) MRICS FBEng MCIOB, is principal trainer with BYL Training.
