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Firefighter safety


has to change. Firefighters cannot safely search a warehouse the size of three football pitches or an industrial building of unlimited size, find a casualty and rescue them, while an uncontrolled fire is raging around them. This is especially true when we consider that the whole interior of a ‘single storey warehouse’, with an 18m ceiling height, could comprise racking with staircases and four or five levels of access walkways, and could employ dozens of people: an uncompartmented five storey building in all but name. But quite rightly, ADB will not be changed unless


there is hard evidence to support that change, so the FBU devised a strategy to produce such evidence. The thinking goes as follows: 1. From the time of ignition, how long does it take for sufficient fire and rescue service resources to arrive at a warehouse fire and to begin search and rescue operations?


2. From the time of ignition, how long is it before fire conditions are so bad that an incident commander would withdraw firefighters for their own safety?


3. Subtracting the former from the latter reveals how much time firefighters have available to them to ‘safely’ search a warehouse


4. How much area can firefighters search in the time they have available?


5. ADB should recommend that warehouses larger than that area should be provided with sprinklers to ‘assist firefighters’.


Before explaining any further, a couple of matters have to be made clear. Firstly, when we talk about firefighters ‘safely’ searching a warehouse, we use the term advisedly. Firefighting is never truly safe and firefighters are always at risk when undertaking operational duties. Secondly, it is important to say that reducing the limit on unsprinklered warehouses and industrial


buildings in ADB does not mean that every such building over that limit must have sprinklers. ADB is only one way to meet the Building Regulations. Reducing the limit in ADB simply means that if someone wants to build a larger warehouse without sprinklers, they would have to use some other approach such as fire engineering (BS 7974 PD 5) to prove that there were still ‘reasonable facilities to assist firefighters in the protection of life’. The FBU’s fire safety advisor asked various fire and


rescue services if they would help with this project, and eventually chief fire officer Steve McGuirk from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (now retired) offered the resources of his service.


Project delay


During the first half of 2017, some good progress was made with the project,and it was hoped that a report would be completed by the autumn of 2017. The fire at Grenfell Tower in June of 2017 threw that timetable into chaos, but there is progress worthy of reporting and, with the revision of ADB now looking more likely than ever, the work must be completed soon in order to be submitted for consideration.


Progress to date


Attendance time Thanks have to be expressed to the Fire Protection Association (FPA), which was instrumental in helping to analyse the attendance time of fire and rescue service resources to warehouse fires. A service’s published attendance standard is of little use in considering attendance standards to warehouse fires, because published attendance standards describe general performance standards – but warehouses (especially large ones) are not distributed randomly.


FOCUS


www.frmjournal.com FEBRUARY 2018


33


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