S 2.15 Fire safety inspections

Initiation responsibility: Head of Site Technical Services, Head of IT Section

Implementation responsibility: Fire Protection Officer

The construction and use of buildings must comply with fire protection regulations. These are laid down in DIN and VDE standards and are supplemented by requirements imposed by the building inspectorate (see also S 1.6 Adherence to fire protection regulations).

Experience shows that once such regulations have been in use in daily operations for a while, people become more and more careless about implementing them and in extreme cases the provisions may be totally ignored. Some examples:

• Escape routes are blocked, e.g. by furniture or stocks of paper.

• Fire cut doors and smoke protection doors are kept open by wedging.

• Permissible fire loads are exceeded by increasing quantities of cables or as a result of newly-defined uses.

• Fire walls and/or fire seals are damaged during operations and/or are not properly repaired.

• Smoke alarm systems in the vicinity of "smokers' corners" are deliberately disabled.

Fire safety inspections should be carried out once or twice per year, with or without prior notice.

Since the conduct of employees is not normally determined by malevolent intent, but by operational requirements or convenience, it is inappropriate for a fire safety inspection to be aimed at detecting and punishing offenders. Rather, the identified shortcomings and their causes should be remedied immediately.

Additional controls:

• Are fire safety inspections carried out on a regular basis and are all identified deficiencies rectified?