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FIRE SERVICE AND GENERAL FIRE SAFETY TOPICS => Fire Safety => Topic started by: AnthonyB on May 15, 2019, 11:27:03 AM

Title: Stay put office?
Post by: AnthonyB on May 15, 2019, 11:27:03 AM
Hi,

I've an odd one here - a 5 year old 10 storey office block built with sprinklers, natural stair and powered lift lobby ventilation, L1 fire alarm and 120 minute compartmentation of floors and shafts. It already has extended TD and more than one door into the FF lobby that a retrospective fire strategy has addressed.

The original fire strategy is two sides of A4 and at first looks like phased evacuation with 2 floors initially activating.....but then it stops.

No more floors are evacuated until after the fire service arrive and decide what needs to happen next. They can then press a button to evacuate a floor and a bank of buttons for all floors is at the FS access point.

However the Building Manager has to keep time as if the FS don't arrive within 15 minutes then he has to decide which floors to evacuate next and manually work his way through the building trying to space his button pressing to no quicker than 3 minute intervals.

Apparently the FRS are happy with this (no proof) yet the barrage of correspondence over the years when duty holders in the building have questioned this suggests that the FRS were never even asked to comment.

Current management aren't comfortable, the more detailed retro fire strategy assumes normal evacuation, so we are planning to program in the normal 3 minute auto phasing of pairs of floors as in standard phased C&E.

Has anyone come cross this before?
Title: Re: Stay put office?
Post by: Fishy on May 15, 2019, 05:36:58 PM
No - we sometimes design facilities with an element of 'stay put' where there are control facilities that serve operations that can't simply be shut down quickly, but I've never come across something as wacky as what you describe!