The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Understanding Fire Development – Part 285

January 6, 2025 11:43 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 284, looked at how people react to signs of fire when they are committed to an activity or have paid for food. In part 285, we consider what happens when the fire itself becomes the point of interest to the public.

As has been established in our previous blogs, fires inside buildings act and react very differently to outdoor fires such as bonfires. It might seem unlikely that any person inside a building would delay evacuating to watch a fire develop, but it has happened many times in the past and in the cases of the fire at Bradford Football Stadium and a nightclub called Stardust in Dublin, it led to disaster and fatalities.

The reasoning behind this is likely to be that when a bonfire is created, people stand around that and watch it burn and so when a similarly-sized fire is seen inside a building, people do not realise how quickly flashover can occur, or that their route to an exit is becoming impassable.

In addition, people feel a compulsion to confer about the fire with friends, colleagues or others who are watching the fire. It’s a highly unusual event and a very serious matter. In the workplace, events that are serious are referred to senior staff for their decision and judgement. In the case of a fire, this remains the modus operandi and instances have occurred where an employee will go further into the building (or higher up the building) to seek out their superiors to ask for guidance and report the situation.

These inclinations are, of course, extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. It is important that staff training includes the need to evacuate immediately without further consultation, reporting or watching the fire. Voice alarm systems are a significant help in telling people to evacuate immediately.

A useful tool to use during staff fire safety training is videos available to purchase which illustrate the speed at which fires can develop. The Building Research Establishment (BRE) produces videos on YouTube which illustrate very clearly the terrifying speed at which fires can develop indoors. This living room with a Christmas tree video shows clearly the inferno that can develop in less than a minute from a fire starting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLHhG65fLeY).

In part 286 of this series, LWF will begin to discuss the concept of panic in a fire situation. 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.