Facilities management Different challenges
In some instances, multi tenanted buildings can present difficulties. As part of the service agreement, tenants will often need to agree with their landlord to follow certain health and safety requirements. Typically, these include life safety protocols,such as evacuating the building when the fire alarm is actuated, or other methods of safety communication, including public address announcements. Often, there will be a health and safety
committee, chaired by a facilities manager or landlord representative, to which each of the tenants sends safety representatives to share information. The usual aim is to achieve a consistent response to emergencies. Sometimes these arrangements are not always so clear cut, and there can be particular issues with ‘business centre’ type operations, where there may be many individual occupants, often with licences rather than tenancies, which are sometimes short term. This can be especially critical because, in the case of short term users, compliance with the arrangements in the original licence arrangements may not always be followed, for instance where a small office suite is used to keep trade stock, which might present a greater fire risk. This is just one example. FRAs are frequently based on an element
of assumption, and if tenants or licensees do not comply with their agreements, it could increase the expected level of fire risk or delays in evacuation. Therefore, the manager should ensure that
there really is a fully agreed approach with the landlord concerning enforcing, as well as educating everyone on, a fire safety strategy.
Same old routine?
The basic routines that relate to fire safety should always be followed and on time. While once again, this seems to be an obvious statement, matters such as quarterly inspections of fire detection systems are sometimes allowed to slip a little, and preventative maintenance routines of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are not necessarily followed through.
Sometimes, this can be compounded by
incorrect assumptions about the extent to which the HVAC was designed to be part of the fire protection system of the building. Where it is, this is typically through smoke extraction. If operations and maintenance (O and M) manuals cannot be found or seem incomplete, the manufacturer needs to be contacted. This can apply to HVAC and other complex building systems, and is most common when the contractor has changed a number of times.
FOCUS
www.frmjournal.com FEBRUARY 2019
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