Choosing fire protection for your business | where do you start?

Collaborative Post | Fire is a risk that businesses have had to deal with for literally thousands of years. While the nature of fire itself hasn’t changed much, thankfully, businesses now have a variety of different fire risk mitigation solutions available to them. Here, we take a look at where you should start, exploring everything from regulatory concerns to roller shutters.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Risk assessment

​As with any form of risk mitigation, you need to start by trying to understand the risk that you’re facing, through the use of risk assessments. By using the Fire Brigade’s Fire Risk Assessments, you can start to understand the nature of your specific fire risks, which will better prepare you to come up with ways to mitigate them.

Checking your regulatory requirements

In the UK, businesses are required by law to abide by a range of different fire safety regulations. It’s important that you’re fully informed on your legal duties, checking with both your industry regulators if applicable and with the local authorities. The regulations you’re required to abide by may differ slightly from place to place, and it’s important that you’re compliant at all times to avoid legal repercussions.

Implement a fire detection system

​Next, you can start to plan and implement a fire detection system. This will likely need to be designed and installed by experts, because with most businesses, you’ll need more than just a couple of simple smoke detectors. The alarm system will need to be connected to a centralised control panel, and will also need to be linked to a number of other systems, such as alerting the relevant authorities.

Implement a fire suppression system

In many cases, you’ll want your fire detection system to do more than just raise the alarm and notify the authorities. You may also want to connect it to a sprinkler system, and a series of automatic fire and smoke barriers from somewhere like LBS Group. These systems can at least slow the spread of the fire, providing the fire services with enough time to attend the scene and get things under control.

​Training your employees

If you’re taking fire safety seriously in your business, you’ll also need to provide your employees with a certain amount of fire safety training. This will include conducting fire escape drills, and assigning responsibility to certain individuals to ensure that everyone is able to evacuate in the case of a fire. This training will need to be updated on a regular basis, to ensure that it remains effective in the long run. Evacuation drills should be timed, and each successive drill should ideally take less time than the last.

It’s important that you don’t just treat fire protection in your business as a mere formality, a regulatory box that you need to check off. Fires in the workplace can lead to injury or even death, and it’s essential that you take clear measures to protect your employees from this risk. By following the steps listed above, you should be well on your way to creating a safe environment for your employees to work in.


Disclaimer: this is a collaborative post.
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