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Mersey

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  1. I have just checked an engineering stores / office. There is one way in and one way out their office area. Their office (6 staff) is on the 1st floor which they access via a concrete staircase with two breeze block walls either side of the stairwell so it appears to be what I would consider as protected stair well. I went into an adjacent room to find out if there is anything stored underneath the stairs and found it to have an unlocked sliding door jam pack with old archive combustible (paper boxes etc..) Although it is a concrete stairwell I could see small gaps through it 10-20mm in various location, there is a distribution board in this cupboard space too I'm unclear whether it is redundant. They do have an automatic fire detection system so if a fire was to start under the stairs then I'm sure the AFD would alert them before they were filled with smoke. Is it just good practice to clear this area of combustible material or is in lawful due to it being a final escape / only escape stair well? I'm going to ask people to remove the files but if met with resistance I wanted to be able to challenge back, I'll try and attach the picture
  2. Thanks Tom, Am I entitled to see the FRA of the entire building though?
  3. I know this is a common question and I have looked through some of the old posts to see if anything similar to my issue has been posted. We occupy an office within a large office block full of different users / companies. Although we are on the ground floor due to the design of the building (being on a slope) our nearest fire exit is 10m along the corridor then up a 15 ft stairwell to the fire escape , which is fine for an able bodied person, the other exit is along a corridor which leads to the reception area and out , to the reception area (length of the corridor is about 45M, then another 10M to the outside (55M in total). I'm unsure what other people get up to in their office space, not sure whether they have their own heaters / vape / toasters / PAT testing etc.. I have no visibility on this. Also is no automatic fire detection in any of the corridors or the offices, so if a fire was discovered it would need to be by a human I'm not expert but I think the travel distance is excessive given the lack of a decent automatic fire detection system and if the fire was along the corridor towards the reception then a disabled person would struggle to exit the building. There are no sleeping occupants its a 9-5 office and they do have fire extinguishers, they do test the sounders on a weekly basis (apparently) I have asked the building management company on numerous occasion for a copy of their FRA but so far been unsuccessful. I did find out the the local fire and rescue had been to site to inspect and said that their FRA was not suitable or sufficient and that was in 2015. My main question is about the travel distance curios to know what people think about this situation too
  4. I am a member of the institute of fire safety managers but I certainly do not profess to know it all, far from it hence me signing up to this excellent website which I have just only found. I was after an opinion on a scenario that I came across while reviewing a Fire Risk Assessment in one of our Warehouses. It's quite difficult to describe the building without photos, but in essence there is a prefabricated upstairs office (Within the warehouse kind of like an inner room) which has a wooden stairwell which is its only access.As you go up the wooden stairs you hit a T junction where you can go left or right , the office is open planned and extends 10M in either direction. What I was uncomfortable with is that there is a storage room under the stairs where the maintenance man stores electric power tools , paints, little work bench., this room under the stairs does have automatic fire detection, so if something was to go on fire providing the alarm system works then people would evacuate the office space in time. Providing there is a good culture of fire safety and regular fire drills / maintenance of alarm systems etc..Is this acceptable place for storage and small works (providing no hotwork takes place), I'm no expert but the stairs give me the impression that if a fire started in that room (which is unlikely) those stairs would be ablaze within 5 minutes. My head says although it maybe acceptable due to the fire prevention / detection it doesn't seem good practice - I was considering asking them to move the storage and small workshop to another location.
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