FIRE EVACUATION (OUT OF HOURS WORKING)

[MPH]

I would appreciate comment / advice upon the following:

I have a large Warehouse and Distribution Centre which operates 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Attached to this building, although separated by a substantial fire wall, are various offices (same company, but different functions), normally working between the hours of 08:00 - 18:00 also on a 5 days a week basis.

The office area has a fully manned reception between the hours of 08:00 - 18:00. Whilst the warehouse has trained Fire Wardens across all shifts, the office areas only have Fire wardens covering the period 08:00 - 18:00.

In the office areas, on ad hoc occasions, some members of the management team and on occasion all members of the senior management work past 18:00 sometimes until 21:00 - 22:00.

The conundrum that I am trying to solve is how can I manage this situation without requiring the management team to prebook/preadvise their intention to work past 18:00 and still ensure their continuing safety in a fire situation.

Also, how to account for these people in the event of a fire alarm activation without having to send a member of the warehouse team and/or site Security officer to carry out a sweep of the whole of the office area which could take 10-15 minutes to do.

We have full automatic sprinkler protection and optical beam smoke detection across the whole of the warehouse, linked to an automatic fire alarm system with automatic remote monitoring. In addition, within all office areas and voids are smoke detection devices which are also linked to the automatic fire alarm system. If the fire alarm activates in either the warehouse or office areas, sounders activate across all of these areas and the remote monitoring link is activated.

All thoughts and suggestions would be very welcome. Thank you.

[Marky]

This is obviously a very common problem and one which I believe is not often considered.

Firstly, I think you need to consider this in terms of practicablility, reasonableness etc. What I mean by this, is that although we may strive to have an infallable system in place which covers all eventualities, somethimes that just is not possible. Even with the comprehensive system you have developed for the warehouse where you have staff designated to 'sweep and clear' all areas, there will almost certainly be occasions when this will fall down, when this happens, the only thing to do is to ensure that relevant information is passed to the arriving fire service personnel such as which areas were not checked; after all if there were a real fire, you would not expect the immediate areas to be checked as usual if that puts your staff at risk.

If you consider large high rise buildings where a phased evacuation is the norm, what happens there after normal working hours, when floor fire wardens might not be available at each floor to manage the evacuation? It is often the case with these, that at a pre-determined time the evacuation switches to single stage rather than phased but this will place late workers in the same position as you describe, they won't have been counted in (although some buildings are very secure and do count everyone in) and nobody will know for sure if they are around. You could have those few people who work late 'sign in' at the end of the usual working day but who would look after this and in all honesty, would you expect that to work?

The office I am sat in at the moment relies upon a sweep and clear system in the event of a fire, it's 08:35 and there are about 15 of us here, but none of the designated fire wardens, so if we evacuated now we would not be able to account with any certainty for everyone here, we would obviously do our best to account for everyone and I think that is a reasonable approach.

For what it's worth, my opinion would be that you should document the usual processes which are used during evacuations and that out of normal hours, anyone left in that part of the building should report to an assembly point where they would no doubt have a very good idea of who was in that part of the building. It's important that you show in your risk assessment that you have considered this issue and that you have perhaps mitigated the level of risk to 'as low as reasonably practiable' by issuing instruction to those late workers.

Here's another similar issue, how do large supermarkets cope when they are open late at night with a skelleton staff working but with the same vast floor area to sweep and clear as they have during the day, when there are plenty of staff around? If I had to guess, I'd say they probably just do their best.