Glaringly obvious oversight

[lyledunn]

I have undertaken or have been responsible for many fire risk assessments and compliance surveys over my career. All are associated with licensing provision within the hospitality sector.   Any fire risk assessments I do personally are restricted to non-complex situations even though I have been involved as part of the design team for quite a few construction / refurbishment projects that stretched even the fire engineers involved. I guess what I am saying is that I know buildings and I have a good handle on what is required for compliance. So it would seem unforgiveable, negligent even, that I missed the absence of fire protection to a floor immediately above a commercial kitchen in a small hotel. The standard exposed grid suspended ceiling over the kitchen had tiles removed to permit access for electrical works so it allowed full view of the floor joists of the bedroom floor above. Instead, I concentrated attention on the passage of the ventilation ductwork and hoist through the floor missing the blindingly obvious lack of protection to the floor itself! Luckily, my business partner, an architect, had cause to be on site and pointed out my error. Not unexpectedly this has annoyed me big style. I would greatly appreciate your opinion as to whether such an omission would warrant removing oneself from conducting fire risk assessments in the future.

[Messy]

As yet, they haven't developed a robot to complete FRAs or carry out fire safety work. Only humans can do this and as such, we all have an inherent design fault, ion that we sometimes make mistakes.

It's my view that making a mistake or in this case, an omission, is absolutely fine as long as you learn from it, grow and move on. At a time when I am coming to terms with the lies, spin and downright wilful negligence and fraud being demonstrated by some in our industry during the Grenfell Inquiry, if you don't mind me saying so, throwing your hands in the air and packing it all in over what is a small accidental oversight is somewhat excessive.

As a regular on here I have noted your professional motivation to do the right thing. I have shared your pain when observing your efforts at one particular project where huge difficulties challenged you but you kept on going. 

I am sure you will never miss checking a kitchen ceiling again given the same opportunity, so recognising a mistake and learning is the key. So in the words of Winston Churchill - my advice is to KBO

[AnthonyB]

The omission was spotted before it was too late, it was remediated and no one has been harmed. You have been open about the error, accepted your mistake and learnt from it so you won't do it again.

Therefore that put's you above many doing FRAs so I'd say keep at it.

[kml]

Hi Lyle,

I wouldn't call it glaringly obvious when it seems to have got past building control, ten years of risk assessment by others and regular inspection by FRS, also may have had a fire cert pre Nov 2010, I certainly wouldn't be thinking of a career change.

[lyledunn]

Thank you all for your sage words. I am back in the saddle with renewed vigour! Small as we are, we still have QA procedures to attend to so I wrote up a brief action plan that will assist in minimising the risk of oversights in future.