Content about: Fire Safety
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What Is a Defend in Place or 'Stay Put' Evacuation Strategy?
Understanding the stay put or defend-in-place evacuation strategy is crucial to understanding fire safety in purpose built blocks of flats in the UK. This post explains, what a defend in place evacuation strategy is, what is necessary for the strategy to work, and the circumstances in which a change in strategy might be necessary.
Defend in Place Defend in place has been a central component of the design of apartment blocks since the post-war reconstruction era.
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What Is Compartmentation?
Compartmentation or compartmentalisation are concepts that are crucial to building fire safety in the United Kingdom, but which are routinely undermined and misunderstood by those engaged in installing systems and maintaining buildings.
What is compartmentation? Simply put, compartmentation is the process of dividing a building into compartments that are independent of one other.
Why is compartmentation important? Compartmentation in buildings is an important concept in fire safety. If the building is constructed, maintained and used correctly, a fire should be contained within the compartment of origin for the period it was intended to be.
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Building Risk Profiles - An Introduction
Building Risk Profiles are a fairly straightforward way of categorising buildings from a fire safety point of view, yet a concept that many fire risk assessor interviewees are surprisingly unfamiliar with. This article provides an introduction to the concept.
Risk Profiles The building risk profile is a concept derived from BS9999:2017 Fire safety in the design, management and use of buildings – Code of practice.
The risk profile is a composite of two factors, the type of occupancy, and the fire growth rate.
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The Influence of Building Legislation on Fire Safety in England and Wales
This article describes how building legislation in England and Wales influences the fire safety of buildings in occupation.
Summary The Building Act 1984 set out the framework for Building Regulations to be made, and for Documents to be Approved providing practical Guidance. Approved Document B provides practical guidance on how to comply with the functional fire safety requirements set out in the Building Regulations 2010, which were made under the Act.
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Premises Information Boxes
Coming into force on 23 January 2023, Regulation 4 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 required responsible persons of high rise residential buildings to install secure property information boxes in or on their buildings, and to check it at least annually to ensure that the content remains up to date.
Premises information boxes serve to make building and apparatus information readily available to the fire and rescue service in the event of attendance to the building.
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Fire Door Inspection - Multi Occupancy Residential Buildings > 11m
On 23rd January 2023 the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 come into force. The Home Office has published its Fact Sheet on the requirement for inpection of fire doors, including flat front-doors, in multi-occupant residential buildings taller than 11m.
The requirements require responsible persons, more about who they are in a later post, to undertake:
Quarterly checks of all fire doors to the common parts of these buildings. To use best endeavours to inspect all of the residential flat front door This presents responsible persons with two practical problems: