The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Human Behaviour – Part 273

October 7, 2024 10:46 am

Lawrence Webster Forrest (LWF) is a specialist fire engineering and fire risk management consultancy whose aim is to give information on best practice in fire safety for facilities management personnel through this blog series. In part 272, LWF began to discuss the subject of human behaviour in fire situations. In part 273, we look at how physical fire protection measures have been changed due to experiences of real fire situations.

The experiences and actions of people in real fire situations have fed into the development of fire precautions. Changes in the design of fire protection measures have historically been made to take into account the uncertainty and lack of confidence about the actions of people in buildings on fire, leading to fire precautions which are more forgiving of human error or omission.

Real life issues have impacted product design in a very real way. For instance, BS 5839-1 Fire detection and fire alarm systems for buildings – Code of practice for design, installation, commissioning and maintenance of systems in non-domestic premises contains a recommendation that all fire alarm control panels are provided with a clearly labelled facility for starting the fire alarm sounders. This is because a serious hotel fire took place where a member of staff silenced the fire alarm sounders, before realising that there was a significant fire and was unable to restart the sounders, as there was no obvious way of doing so. The solution in that instance would have been to operate the reset function on the control panel, but in such a situation, the solution did not seem obvious to those persons in a position to operate it.

It can’t be stated categorically that the member of staff or other staff members were panicking, but there was certainly a lot happening that they did not feel in control of and so, mistakes were made and fatalities resulted. The term ‘panic’ is used in relation to people – both members of the public and staff of an organisation – when human error or poor decision-making causes a bad situation to become worse. However, insufficient staff fire safety training, tiredness, a lack of information or simply conflicting information from various sources can lead to disaster.

In part 274 of this series, LWF will continue to look at how real life fire situations have affected fire safety product design. In the meantime, if you have any queries about your own facilities or wish to discuss this blog series, please contact LWF on freephone 0800 410 1130.

Lawrence Webster Forrest is a fire engineering consultancy based in Surrey with over 35 years’ experience, which provides a wide range of consultancy services to professionals involved in the design, development and construction and operation of buildings.

 

While care has been taken to ensure that information contained in LWF’s publications is true and correct at the time of publication, changes in circumstances after the time of publication may impact on the accuracy of this information.

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