so thay have found a load of hospitals with combustible cladding.....wonder who will be first to point out hospitals are designed to evacuate horizontaly through a compartment wall ? .... load of good that will be......
The problem is as with all of these issues that there is no joined up thinking when changes are made. You can bet nobody considered the problems if this cladding was used, for example with external gas pipes, plastic window frames or indeed the method of evacuation, as many things are safe if you observe their safety rules when using them.
Fragmentation and loss of knowledge gained through experience is the price we pay for the modern short term tendered out system of managing stuff. #
Brian
With hospitals you also have to bear in mind that there are some patients who can't be evacuated. So you do want absolutely the minimum risk there.
SteveW
yes horizontal evacuation .... not so good when the cladding is going up like a torch all around the building and jumping the ends of the compartmentation ......
I am an Australian and I can relate a similar bizarre building hazard here causing regular death. I am talking about the building code (or lack ofit) for laying under-roof insulation. The danger starts at home wiring , they go on the ceailing as bear cables r unning haphazard on th roof. The insulation bats are laid on the wooden top frame in spce between studs. Many a tradesmen have been electrocuted while laying/replacing the bats simply when they stamp their "insulated" boots o ver the cable damaging it and getting zapped. The insulating bats themselve s are reportedly non supporting fire, one only needs to see them go in flam e in winter when a fire incident occurs 9due again to poor open heaters ins tallation, frayed wiring in electric blankets etc., etc.
All is hunky dory till something big and nasty happens and then hell break s loose. Strenge beings we are the earthlings!!
Think you've missed the point, Brian. Not even the makers of the cladding considered it safe for use on buildings above a certain height.
I've not seen much information before on the actual tests being done on the samples ...
Hospitals have proper alarm systems and effective fire and smoke doors that close automatically (so no silly business jamming them open).
They also have regular fire drills and established evacuation procedures.
And they are staffed by people who have a bit more IQ and grey matter than your average illegal immigrant.
How do you know that ?
Really, I bet that don't.
Here's a test for you, here were I work at a university I have asked them what the fire alarm test actually does.
What do you think it does ?
It's to check that all the sounders/lights work and the self closing doors operate.
Here they do such a check every week, by setting noff the alarms sometime b etween 8-9am (last time I checked it was 8:15. My fire alarm was reported to be NOT working on 10th may, where not working meant I was sitting here while the fire alarm was going off because the fi re alarm wasn;t making ANY sound ast all, it was making as much sound as a Norwegian blue.
Now if the alarms are tested when no one is here to hear them does that mea n they are working ? If you can't hear a tree being cut down in the Brazialian rain forest does that mean it isn't being cut down ?
So I'll, ask again how do you test fire alarms.
We also have a set of central doors with the expanding bead strip, these do ors automataccly release their hold (maglocks on the top of the doors) but they do NOT auto close because the auto close mecanisuim hasn't been put on these since they were put in 5 years ago.
Just got back from the fire alarm sounding luckily I was at lunch.
Theoreticlly, the person conducting the test has to check ALL the sounders, etc.
Then your buildings Fire Risk Assessment needs to be re-done.
It's a bit difficult it;s a pretyy big campus there being 21 departments and even more buildings. there's a handful of fire sstaff which makes it impossible to do in the time as they have admitted and the alarms are tested out of hours 8-8:30 apparently.
Re-done well I'd like to see the original one nowe I've found out that we failed our safety audit a year or so ago, seems that was kept quiet. Managment only inform us of the important things such as going for an athena swan silver.
Where I work the alarm is tested at 2pm every Friday (done then because it shuts down the aircon and as we finish at 3pm, they've got all weekend to get it reset). Throughout the building, you can always hear more than one sounder, so it is a case of reporting if you hear more distant sounders and not the deafening one near you.
In the previous building it was a pain because they sounded it for about
15 seconds, then there was a pause of another 20, followed by sounding the bomb alarm for 15 seconds. It always seemed to happen when you were in the middle of phone call!SteveW
pity the ward toilets are full of patients smoking...why don't they have smoke detectors in there .....?
But presumably each building has it's own independant fire alarm system, possibly linked to connected buildings such that that building sounds a "be aware" alarm when it's connected neighbour sounds "evacuate".
The fire staff just test each building on a rotation and the test should proactively involve the people working in that building to report that a sounder isn't working or that auto close doors didn't. Just hoping that some one might report such things is not good enough.
Not sure about the "be aware" alarm but yes that is how it happens.
Yes here's a direct quote from them.
"We test 3 or 4 buildings every day"
Yes that's pretty much it, but if you have fire doors installed that don't have automatic closers how does a fire marshel ensure the fire doors are working correctly ?
Well those running the test have just asked for a akey so they can get into the lab when the do a fire alarm test which is done 8-9am. Which isnlt bad considering the keys to the lab have been the same for about ~30 years, so I'm not sure how the fire alarms have been 'tested' previously.
How do you test a fire alarm sounder when there's no one around to hear it, is it one of those psychology tests ?
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