How To Improve Your Passive Fire Protection Strategy
How To Improve Your Passive Fire Protection Strategy
Alongside comprehensive active fire protection systems, a passive fire protection strategy plays a critical role in any building’s overarching fire safety strategy. Passive fire protection refers to the components and systems within a building that work to prevent or slow the spread of smoke and fire, allowing occupants more time to evacuate safely and minimising damages to your building and its contents. Improving your passive fire protection measures can therefore make a significant difference to how your building responds to a fire emergency and boost your first line of defence against fire damage. Here’s how you can achieve this…
Check Your Building Compartmentation
Understanding the needs of your building and the fire compartments within it is a central part of your passive fire protection strategy. Fire compartments within a building sub-divide spaces into smaller, fire-resistant sections or areas. The idea is to contain fire and smoke within a specific area, preventing it from spreading to other parts of the building.
There are a number of different systems that can be deployed to compartmentalise a building effectively. These include fire doors, which play a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of the designated compartments as they prevent the spread of fire and smoke through doorways. Also, the installation of fire stopping materials to other gaps and penetrations within the walls, floors, ceilings and windows will further enhance the effectiveness of the compartments within your passive fire protection strategy.
Conduct Regular Fire Door Surveys
Fire doors manufactured, installed and maintained by certified organisations are one of the most important passive fire protection systems. These doors are designed to contain fire and smoke within a specific area, preventing them from spreading to other areas of the building. Not only does this ensure that damage is limited to one area, but also that danger is kept in one place to ensure safe evacuation routes are maintained in the event of an emergency.
However, for fire doors to perform effectively, they must be in good working order and properly installed. This means that regular fire door surveys should form a central part of any passive fire protection strategy as these inspections will help you to ensure that your fire doors meet appropriate standards and are functioning as intended.
During a fire door survey, a qualified fire door inspector will examine the condition of the doors and check for any signs of wear, damage or tampering. They will also check the functionality of the doors themselves to produce a report that can help you proactively address areas of non-compliance and ensure your passive fire protection systems can perform as appropriate.
Schedule Regular Fire Door Maintenance
Fire doors, like any other building component, require regular maintenance to remain effective. Over time, this type of passive fire protection system can become damaged and its hardware can fail, but regular maintenance ensures that these issues are addressed promptly and, crucially, before their weaknesses may be exposed in an emergency.
A regular fire door maintenance schedule should therefore always form part of an overarching passive fire protection strategy and include any necessary repairs or door or component replacement if appropriate.
Invest In Training & Development
A passive fire protection strategy is only as effective as those who implement it. If you want to improve yours, investing in staff training and development is therefore crucial. At the very minimum, everybody who uses the building should take part in regular fire drills and understand their responsibilities on how to respond in an emergency. However, the optimal scenario would be for all staff to also understand the importance of fire safety and any relevant legislation. This ensures greater accountability and shared responsibility for the upkeep of passive fire protection measures.
Work With Accredited Experts
With several practices that can be deployed to improve passive fire protection measures within your building, implementing and improving an appropriate strategy is not a task to be taken lightly. For this reason, you must work with appropriate and accredited experts who have the relevant knowledge and experience to guide you through implementing and maintaining passive fire protection systems,
When selecting fire safety professionals to work with, look for professionals with relevant accreditations like BM Trada Q-mark. Accreditations like these stand as a marker of the quality of service you will receive and the expertise of the fire door inspector, allowing you to be confident that your passive fire protection strategy is robust and compliant.
At WGP Maintenance, our accredited experts are on hand to help you implement tried and tested passive fire protection systems within your building. Our team can carry out comprehensive surveys of your fire doors and the other protective measures installed within your compartments. Alongside new installations and ongoing maintenance and repairs, this will provide you with complete reassurance that your passive fire protection strategy is as strong as it should be. Whether you want to find out more about the systems you could implement, would like some guidance on any of the points raised above, or you would like to arrange a survey with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
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