A matter of life and death – how fire safety training can save businesses and lives

Everyone knows something about fire: what to do in the event of fire; even how to prevent fire in the first place. But how many people know enough about fire safety and prevention to avoid the risk of fire in their place of work – where a small blaze can quickly turn into a building wrecking, life taking inferno? Fire safety training, which can take as little as half an hour, can provide the kind of information for all employees that can save lives and businesses both.
For instance: how many buildings, places of work, have archive centres or filing rooms? And how many of those businesses have employees who are regularly required either to extract files from these stores, or to add to the stored filing already in there? It might surprise many of those employees to know that they are working in one of the most potentially dangerous areas of their company building. Filing is a legal requirement in almost every industry, with a standard file holding time of seven years. That’s a lot of paper to keep stacked somewhere. And stacked it inevitably is, in the aforementioned file vault – which, fire safety training will reveal, is pretty much a powder keg waiting to go off. How high are those files stacked? Do any of their boxes or folders rest near a strip light? It takes seconds for the heat from that strip light to ignite the dust and dry paper underneath it – and only a few more seconds for the rest of the filing room to go up in flames. Once it’s blazing, the only thing that will stop it is running out of fuel – of which there is plenty in the immediate environment.
So – to repeat. How many employees have ever even thought about that kind of danger? Not many, usually. Often, a filing room has been the way it has been for years – which means new employees simply take it as a matter of course that it is how it is and leave it at that. It’s only when management devote a half hour session at the beginning of a working day to booking and delivering fire safety training that people start to question the safety of their environment: and experience shows that, in general, the fire safety of a normal working environment is not good.
The costs, to any business, of a fire are huge and mostly irreparable. Dead and injured staff, of course, is number one concern on that list: but, behind it, one also has to look at the financial implications of losing a whole business lifetime’s worth of information. Fire, which ruins everything it touches, can mean the end of a business as well as the lives of people who worked for it. These kinds of prices are not worth paying for any reason: particularly when a simple fire safety training session can instil enough knowledge to prevent them from ever happening. Don’t miss the boat – if ever there was a case for locking the stable door well in advance of a bolting horse, this is it.

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UK Fire Training provides on-site staff fire training and fire safety training courses by the qualified ex-fire service trainers in UK.

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