FIRE SAFETY & DISASTER RECOVERY REIGNITING SAFETY
Here, West London Security (WLS) highlights its work on a recent project and the joined-up approach to fire and security across the residential, hotel and retail elements of a regeneration scheme.
Designed to transform a section of East London as part of the £3.7bn Canning Town and Custom House Regeneration programme, a new mixed-use scheme that includes residential, retail and leisure accommodation, presented varied challenges when it came to designing and installing the security and fire safety requirements.
Those challenges were taken up by West London Security (WLS), who installed fire safety and security measures across phase II of the development, including the varying requirements of the hotel, the residential blocks and the retail accommodation.
Hotel requirements The 196-room hotel requires a robust fire safety strategy and WLS has installed a fully addressable and programmable fire alarm system that has been integrated with the building management system (BMS) on a cause and effect scenario basis.
Jeremy Ewen from WLS explained: “The guests in a hotel are usually unfamiliar with their surroundings and may find it more difficult to navigate their way to exits in the event of a fire than the occupants of a residential building, who usually know the location of exit doors and staircases.
“The client had already developed a full fire strategy for the hotel, based on the operator’s standard fire protection policies, and we worked closely with them to locate sensors according to their requirements and programme the system to work with their preferred cause and effect scenarios.”
The fire alarm system installed by WLS features sensors throughout the corridors, guest rooms and social spaces within the hotel and has been designed to escalate the response to risk as additional sensors are triggered.
“The system installed in the hotel sends the lift to the ground floor
after the activation of the first sensor, preventing guests from using it.”
Jeremy continued: “In any environment, there must be a balance between responding swiftly to minimise the threat to life and property in the event of an incident, and managing risk effectively to avoid disruption in the event of a false alarm. In a hotel environment, for example, we want to avoid a complete evacuation from a single sensor being triggered by a cigarette, while ensuring that evacuation is triggered promptly and carried out efficiently in the event of a verified risk.”
To provide high levels of protection that escalate as the level of threat detected increases, the system installed in the hotel sends the lift to the ground floor after the activation of the first sensor, preventing guests from using it as this would present a danger in the event of a genuine fire. If a second sensor is triggered, the BMS will shut down all electrical and mechanical plants and the automatic opening ventilation (AOV) system will be triggered to allow smoke to escape.
In addition to interfacing with the building’s BMS, the smoke detection and fire alarm system has also been integrated to a pager system, ensuring that the duty manager is notified of any incident, should he/she be out of earshot of the audible alarm.
The hotel has also been designed with disabled access and safety in mind. Four rooms on each floor have been designed for use by disabled guests and WLS has installed pull cords for requesting help, along with a vibrating fire alarm to alert deaf guests to danger in the event of a fire. Each level of the hotel has also been fitted with a disabled refuge for every staircase on each landing to assist those unable to use the stairs to call for help and await rescue.
28 | TOMORROW’S FM
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