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customers and reduced sales across main markets in agriculture and industry. To prevent the occurrence of similar scenarios,
more proactive decision making regarding business resilience measures are required to ensure businesses safeguard themselves from the devastating effects of fi re. Unless trading can continue quickly, businesses feel the financial pressures of maintaining cash fl ow and often fl ounder. Fire is indiscriminate and inexplicable, but actions can still be taken to control it when it occurs. In contrast to the total loss of the Total Polyfi lm
factory, a fire in February 2016 at a similar plastics manufacturer in the west country, BPI, saw that business return to operation within 24 hours. The difference was that the BPI factory had a sprinkler system, which contained the fi re. A sprinkler system works by only setting off sprinklers in the immediate vicinity of a fi re, and a recent study of UK fi re statistics showed that 95% of fi res are controlled or even extinguished by the operation of fewer than five sprinklers. This debunks the myth that if one sprinkler goes off, then all of them will1
. Myths about cost
Automatic fi re sprinklers are not widely used in the UK today because the guidance rarely prescribes their use. Yet automatic fi re sprinklers prevent large fi res, because they activate automatically over a
54 MAY 2020
www.frmjournal.com
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