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Modern fire safety equipment, fire-safe building design and aware residents are the ingredients to make a fire safe living experience.
Most contemporary buildings across India today need to be fire safety compliant to get an approval for construction but then there are fire-dumb house owners who illegally tamper with fire safety equipment.
Stupidity aside, here's a do-it-yourself (DIY) fire safety checklist to help you determine the fire readiness of your home.
🧯 Smoke Stop and Fire Doors
Check for -
- Missing or defective smoke stop doors, defective door hinges or broken glazing.
- Smoke stop doors wedged open or not in a properly closed position.
🧯 Fire Escape Routes
Check for -
- Doors/gates in escape routes, common areas installed with locking device which cannot be openable from inside without the use of a key.
- Lock-up of the door to main roof with a locking device which cannot be openable from inside without the use of a key.
- Unauthorized structures such as cabinet, shelves or stores in escape routes.
- Refuse, waste furniture or similar obstructions in escape routes.
- Emergency exits and lights/signage leading to them are working properly.
Check for -
- Extinguishers provided in the building are defective, damaged, missing or lack scheduled maintenance.
- Manual fire alarm call points are defective, damaged or obstructed by other objects.
- Fire hydrants / hose reels system are defective, damaged or obstructed.
- Signs of Fire Service Inlets / Sprinkler Inlets / Hose Reels or Hose Reel cabinets are illegible or missing.
- Obstruction to sprinklers by storage racks, goods, fixed structures such as loft, cabinet, etc.
- Unauthorized tampering with the Fire Service installations such as the shut-down of the control valves of sprinkler system rendering the system not in efficient working order.
Check for -
- Damaged or untidy electric wires.
- Multiple devices plugged into a single wall plug or naked wires stuffed into plug sockets.