I work for a company with several large hotels in central London, the largest of which has somewhere in the region of 4500 detector heads. At present we successfully manage a staff alarm where our fire team have 5 minutes to investigate an actuation by a single head before the fire brigade is called. This has significantly reduced the number of calls to the fire brigade over the years. However, we still experience fairly regular incidents of malicious call point actuations.
In order to reduce these, the call points are sited inside stairwells rather than along the corridors, and in some places have been provided with lift-up covers. In our experience having a cover to lift does very little to prevent a vandal from activating the call point if that is their intention. Nor would CCTV help much. Firstly we would need a huge number of cameras to cover every call point and even then, CCTV does not prevent vandalism, only helps to confirm that, yes, the call point was activated by an unknown human being.
Once we have one evacuation, we usually then experience copy-cat evacuations over successive days and nights, either from people who thought it was funny to see the fire brigade turn up in the middle of the night, or disgruntled customers out for revenge on their lost sleep. In any case, we have found the net result is that when you have to evacuate several thousand people at 4am because of vandalism, you can wave goodbye to their repeat custom and expect a flood of complaint letters erroneously claiming that the fire alarm ‘does not work’.
We have looked at the idea of phased evacuations, but when the alarm sounds at night, an evacuation on one floor will disturb everyone else in the building. To go down the route of a voice alarm system, whereby we could call people out section at a time would be wonderful, but after several enquiries, for the largest of our sites we would be looking somewhere around 250K to have the system fitted.
However, in the ‘new’ fire risk assessment guides for sleeping accommodation (pp.53-54) we think we may have found a solution. In the section on manual call points one of its recommendations to reduce unwanted alarms was to have ‘a delayed alarm for investigation purposes.’ When reading this I was reminded for the Fire Action Notices in my local London Underground station which say ‘Operate the fire alarm. No sound will be heard but the fire brigade will be called.’
I contacted our Inspecting Officer from the fire brigade and proposed extending the delay to call points in areas that had AFD coverage and providing a suitably worded fire action notice with each device. We reasoned that in most cases AFD would detect a smoldering fire before a person did and that the fire team would already be en-route by the time the person reached the nearest MCP and activated it. If the person reached the MCP first, it would not be long before AFD noticed the fire also. In our experience of using a delay, the average time for our fire team reaching even the furthest point on the guest floors is about 2½ minutes. Often they are on the scene much sooner than that. Given this proposal, the Inspecting Officer said he would not be against the proposal, but that we ought to perhaps check with our insurers to see if they had any objections.
This is the stage we are at now, and having read contributions on this forum with interest I thought it might be enlightening to see if anyone else has gone down this route, or what comments it might raise.
thanks,
Terry
