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Silent evacuation of a care home
Evacuating a care home has its own unique challenges. Elderly residents could be bedbound, suffering from dementia, hard of hearing, or unable to move without assistance. Added to this is the distress that a loud fire alarm can cause to vulnerable residents.
Fire Door Safety Week
Fire Door Safety Week is a time when the fire industry works to raise awareness of the critical role fire doors play in keeping people safe.
Dorgard. The original and the best
In 1994 our chairman Neil Purssey invented the first wireless hold-open device for fire doors. Dorgard reacted to the sound of a fire alarm to automatically close the door. It did that then and it does that now.
21st Century Town Criers
Mobile phones are the town criers of the 21st Century, everyone finds out news from their device. DMS is a text message emergency alert system for your phone.
How to keep warehouses and industrial sites fire safe
The recent fire at a Tottenham warehouse brings to the forefront the specific challenges with fire safety in warehouses and industrial sites.
Every time you leave a fire door open, a fairy dies
Every time a fire door is wedged open, a fairy dies. A closed fire door policy doesn’t work as people wedge doors open. This means they are useless in a fire.
Post-Its are ectoplasm
Don’t get me wrong, they can be useful. There are those workshops where people slap them around on walls with words like ‘OPTIMISM’ and ‘EMPOWERMENT’ scrawled on them. I am sure that can help but it’s a bit earnest for my taste. I prefer quiet reflection.
The next cucumber
Notices are one of those things that give me nervous twitches. If you want a clue about what an organisation is like, read its notices. A notice is so often a sign of a glitch in the works. For the sake of my sanity, I have named these glitches cucumbers.
The chicken and the wheelie bin
I used to be quite calm about door wedges before I worked at Fireco. Even on fire doors. In hotels, universities, factories – in any place you can think of, the door wedge rules. It’s cheap, it’s effective and it’s lethal.
Do gnats get verrucas?
When I was ten, I remember playing with a compressed air vice where my Dad worked designing and selling automation products. He was in his office, probably wondering which hydrocheck or solendoid operated valve to use and happily smoking.
What added fuel to the Great Fire of London?
In 1666, the Great Fire of London scorched 400 of the city’s streets. There were 13,200 houses and 87 churches all blazing in flames, leaving London in ashes. Here are some of the reasons why the Great Fire of London was one of the biggest fires the world has ever seen.
Brexit and fire safety. What happens now?
Brexit will affect us all. It is a certainty that the way the UK operates will change. How much impact will that change have? The truth is we don’t know, no one has ever left the EU before.
We’ve always done it that way!
Grace Hopper once said “The most dangerous phrase a manager can use is ‘we’ve always done it that way”. Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist whose work was central to the development of one of the foundational high-level computer programming languages.
What does compliance look like?
Fire safety is often overlooked as, luckily, fires don’t happen all the time. Companies who don’t have the right precautions in place are more likely to lose stock, property, their business and, in the worst circumstances, their lives.
How to wake deaf friends and not alienate people
Fiona Stewart had a scary experience at a hotel recently. Fiona, who is deaf, woke up surrounded by her mother, a firefighter and the hotel manager. No, this wasn’t some kind of weird dream. The hotel’s fire alarm had been set off and the building was evacuated.
When fire safety advice and law cross wires
Fire safety can be an extremely confusing subject. There’s a lot to think about, with laws and regulations. Sometimes the lines between practical fire safety advice and the law can become crossed.
Are universities deaf to students’ needs?
In 2016, UCAS registered 507,108 university applicants. Statistically speaking, 1 in 6 of these applicants will have a hearing impairment. That’s a staggering 84,518 students.
Are fire doors and access a contradiction?
Make no mistake, fire doors save lives and property. Not just a regular door, fire doors are a building’s armour in a fire. They block fire and smoke from rapidly spreading so people can escape. But what about when there is no fire?
Kitchen fires — a student rite of passage?
There are people tweeting nearly every day about setting off fire alarms in their halls or starting a fire in the kitchen, sometimes within hours of each other. And this is from universities across the UK. It’s something of a ‘hot’ topic.
10 things estates & fire safety managers missed on Twitter
Twitter is a marvellous thing. It’s as if everyone’s subconscious has suddenly been given a voice. I’m always intrigued by what people say in their tweets, especially students. For me, it’s an invaluable resource of comments and new ideas.
It’s what we do — why I work for Fireco
We’re a bit different at Fireco. Like any business, we want to be credible and we want to be trustworthy and professional, BUT, we also know that you can’t spend 40+ hours every week with the same people without being yourself and having fun.
Fire industry groupthink
To test if a diamond is real, try it on a mirror and it will scratch. People believed this long after Zirconium paste was shown to be equally able to pass the infallible test. It astonishes me how susceptible we are to psychological bias.
Fire doors — thugs of health and safety
Maybe in prehistoric times cavemen used fire to protect themselves from dinosaurs but instead sustained more burns than protection. Perhaps in the Bronze Age more people were injured digging up flint than injured by the arrows they made from it.
Fire safety fines for students
Students are a high-risk group when it comes to fire. Did you know that 81% of students undertake activities that increase the risk of fire in their accommodation?