Order and logistics

 

    Updated: 10 May 2020
 

 

View Ewert Johansson's LinkedIn profile

Sitemap              Subscribe to News

 

Startpage > Products > Smoke Detection > Fire Philosophy

printer-friendly page

 

FIRE PHILOSOPHY

 

Phlosophy on Fires

When discussing fires and disasters, one often hears certain expressions:

  • There are no winners in a fire!

  • The thief leaves something, but the fire doesn’t!

  • The thief takes your TV, but the fire will take your son.

If you yourself as a person or a close relative have been exposed to a fire or if you hear of disasters in hotels or fires on ships where hundreds of people have been killed you are immediately frightened and shocked.

You try to imagine how terrible it must be to suffocate from smoke or be fried by the heat from a fire.

What if one of my children were there. You do want to think like that – the mere thought hurts.

Maybe you start thinking about your own fire protection

Then the questions:

  • How could this happen?

  • How and why did the fire start?

  • Was it possibly arson?

  • Was it carelessness or lack of supervision?

  • If on public premises. Who was really responsible for the fire protection?

  • Who is to blame for what happened?

After a day you will hear the experts and the responsible authorities, politicians and maybe the insurance companies. What they say is usually the following:

  • "The building was built according to current standards."

  • The vessel was "classified" according to Lloyds.

  • The Rescue Services say: "When we arrived it was all in flames, we were too late!"

  • Maybe someone will add: "We had been recommended smoke detectors, but they fell outside the construction budget, so none were installed."

  • Someone expresses, however, with relief: "The insurance will give us £.5,000,000 to cover the damage!"

After some time comes the pale cast of thought, and new appearance in press and on TV.

What should be done to prevent similar accidents from happening again are brought up in discussion panels.

The authorities are contacted to consider "revision or improvement of the regulations” or if "you should just check that the current rules are adhered to."

Unfortunately the incident is forgotten – or maybe this is just as well – as time goes by and other events enter the first page in the newspapers.

The accident has taken place, we must look forward. But what have you lost?

If someone has died, the damage is irreparable for those closely related. There is no insurance to cover the loss of a loved one. It makes no sense accusing any authority.

If the material losses are considerable you may be able to get financial compensation through insurances, but under the circumstances there is much that cannot be replaced by money.

You may lose customers and you may lose irreplaceable cultural values and many other things.

When it comes to fire there are no winners. All are losers!

Preventive fire protection!
Even if you have a good insurance, this is not free!

If the damages become too large the insurance companies will raise the insurance premiums, and as a result of this all will have to pay more.

What you have to invest in above all is the prevention activities.
In all municipalities there is some form of rescue or fire service, and one of their most important tasks is to "prevent the fire" in various ways.

This is unfortunately not always common knowledge. One generally believes that the Fire Department's main task is to extinguish fires and save lives.

Obviously these are very large tasks, but we often hear that lacking resources for prevention means that the focus must be on pure rescue.

It is therefore not fire brigades that to any great extent can to work with prevention against fire. According to the law this duty falls upon the "owner or owners of the building" who are responsible for the fact that the fire protection within the object is sufficient and appropriate to the activity.

There are various methods of preventing fires:

  • Risk awareness of those responsible

  • Good order

  • Procedures for monitoring and surveillance

  • Motivation and training of staff

If you can follow a combination of the above, there is a good chance a fire will not occur and you have succeeded with your preventive measures and "nothing happened".

Goals:
Our goal should then be if you think about preventive measures as follows:

My home or my business will never catch fire!
This is unfortunately not a realistic goal.

It is not better than the zero-vision in traffic!
Fires will start.

Not least arson which is a very big and growing.

So we must accept that fires start. We cannot prevent them from occurring, but what we can do is to reduce the effects fires.

If there is a fire and there is no person around to act, a disaster can easily become a reality.

The fire itself need not be particularly extensive. It depends on what is burning.

Small fires often develop vast amounts of smoke with a great amount of soot, damage by corrosion, put to sleep, and at worst kill.


A fire starts

 

 

 

 


After 1 min

 

 

 

 


After 2 minutes

 

 

 

 


After 3 minutes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Measures to prevent damages

If a fire occurs, it must be Detected Early, either manually or automatically, and this needs to happen at all hours.


The solution to this is discovering detection technologies – THE FIRE ALARM or SMOKE DETECTOR or FIRE GAS DETECTOR.

Ttechnology can help to detect a fire incident at a very early stage, some might think "too early" when a sensitive smoke detector often gives a signal for events that are not fire.

You can "Take the smoke or fire gas to help" when a fire starts. When the smoke reaches the detector you get warning signal indicating that something is happening and you can treat this signal in an intelligent manner. You determine a Correct Action, which may just be to evacuate and save your life, or perhaps to send the signal to a central station to get outside help as quickly as possible.

This philosophy is based on Early Detection of a well considered and Correct Action and if this can be implemented in an intelligent way, a fire incident may be limited to a very minor incident, and the fire can be described as a "HAPPY FIRE" where one can evaluate the economic benefit of Early Detection and Correct Action.

E-mail: lars@fjellcom.se     

Phone: +46(0)31-287202

Mobile: +46(0)706-755561

Disclaimer

Webmaster

blog counter