FEATURE
MAKING COMPLIANCE COUNT
Fire dampers are a critical but often overlooked element of passive fire protection. With the Building Safety Act 2022 and the need for a reliable digital golden thread, updated guidance is placing greater emphasis on asset visibility, accessibility, testing, competence and evidence. Gary Nicholls, Managing Director of Swift Fire Compliance, explains what the latest BESA DW145 guidance means for health and safety professionals.
The Building Safety Act 2022, brought in as a direct result of the Grenfell tragedy, has changed expectations around how safety-critical information is created, maintained and handed over, with evidence-led, robust record keeping now essential.
In higher-risk buildings, the ‘golden thread’ is a digital store of the information needed to understand how a building was designed, constructed and is being managed. For fire dampers this means identifying the assets, understanding their required performance, recording their condition and ensuring remedial actions are carried out and documented.
WHY FIRE DAMPERS MATTER
Where ventilation ductwork passes through a fire-resisting wall, floor or partition, a correctly specified and installed damper helps maintain compartmentation by restricting the spread of fire and smoke. If the damper is missing, damaged, obstructed, inaccessible or installed incorrectly, the opening can undermine the fire strategy and allow smoke and flames to travel through the building.
BESA’s revised DW145 guidance reflects the post- Grenfell emphasis on competence, traceability and evidence across the asset lifecycle. It addresses the installation, inspection, testing and maintenance of fire and smoke control dampers, with greater attention to access, penetration seals, manufacturer instructions and the information needed for future verification.
For health and safety professionals carrying out this work, or calling in expert contractors, meeting the requirements of DW145 should look like the following:
• Maintaining an accurate inventory of every fire and smoke control damper.
• Ensuring each asset can be safely accessed for inspection, testing and maintenance.
• Completing inspection and functional testing at appropriate intervals, with annual inspection as the established benchmark.
• Keeping reliable drawings, an asset register, photographs, test results, defect records and evidence that remedial work has been completed.
These are basic controls, yet BESA figures indicate that fewer than 1% of buildings comply with all of them and that 70% of dampers fail at first inspection. As a first step, those responsible for building safety in commercial buildings need to ask the question: can you identify
38
where every damper is, whether it is accessible, when it was last tested and what happened to any defects?
In existing buildings, the answer is often incomplete. Dampers may be absent from drawings, concealed above ceilings, blocked by other services, poorly supported or separated from the correct fire-stopping detail. Records may identify a test without showing the asset, access route, installation condition or evidence of repair.
WHAT GOOD DOCUMENTATION LOOKS LIKE
A robust baseline starts with the fire strategy and co- ordinated drawings. These should show compartment lines, the points at which ductwork penetrates fire-resisting construction and the location and type of each damper. The information must be detailed enough to connect the design intent with the installed asset, including the relevant wall or floor construction, classification, manufacturer requirements and penetration seal.
The damper register should provide each asset with a unique reference and record its location, type, access arrangements, inspection history, functional test result, defects, and remedial action. Date-stamped photographs should make the asset and its installation context identifiable. Reports should distinguish between observation, test evidence and any limitation that prevented a complete inspection.
Crucially, records must be controlled rather than simply stored. Refurbishment, ceiling replacement, changes to ductwork and new services can all affect access or
WWW.TOMORROWSHS.COM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50
