Silo's

[Fire942]

have been tasked with locating Silos on our station ground and organising an risk assessment to help with operational preparedness and legal requirements of the "confined spaces regs" and the soon to be "working at height regs".

One obvious option is to send a pump or spare bod around all the farms/industrial buildings looking for the things, but this would take a long time/expense due to the station ground size.

Another option is to try and send out a letter to the above but what is the postal addresses of all these farms in the middle of no where? I have tried various organisations but they won't release details because of the data protection act. Yellow pages has a few but now many as farmers have to pay to advertise.

What I am currently looking at is the inclusion in various publications a request for owners of silos to get in touch.

So .... does anyone have any better ideas?

Has anyone created a form/formula appropriate to the fire and rescue
service for assessing the risks posed?

Any help will be appreciated.

[Guest]

Do farms not come under high risk visits?

[Fire942]

The current risk assessment process started with assessments of premices which are known to the brigade through previous fire safety inspections. The process has continued with other known risks however we currently do not assess farms although crews do endeaver to improve local knowledge.

I have consulted both the Generic Risk Assessments within the Fire Service Guide and also the brigade written generic risk assessments both give a good guide to some of the associated hazards. The new manual on rope working is also of interest, although the brigade is still looking into line safety procurement and training.

We currently use a proforma for calculating the risk factors per each premises we visit, the level of risk is assessed depending on the severity we produce site specific risk cards and carry out exercises/drills. The current system seems to work well for assessing the risks associated with a substantial fire, however the process is no designed particularly for the forthcoming 'working at height regulations'.

I strongly agree with 'admin' no paper exercise can replace getting that hands, but if I can slimline the process of finding where they are then we can get to the Silos sooner rather than later.

This topic may be the 'thin end of the wedge' as fire service's truly become Fire and Rescue services.

[Guest]

Do you have a copy of 'a guide to operational risk assessment.?All the info you need is in there, no need to visit every farm in the Brigade area.
You will find a generic R/A for all kinds of incidents.

[Fire942]

Yes we have the nationaly produced generic risk assessments along with the brigade specific.

This topic was thrown up by a training package produced by a consortium of brigades, it plays heavily on carrying out site specific risk assessments. The sort of information which would be drawn up following the assessment would be availability of hard standing, lifting equipment, product stored isolation point etc etc.

The information would then go on a card which would be carried on attending appliances, in the future this would be on a in cab computer system.

Thank you for your reply anyway.