We have several deep fat fryers in our premises located in small industrial kitchens and staff canteens. Each one has a fire blanket and a Wet Chemical Extinguisher located near it. The existing policy advices against employees attempting to use extinguishers / blankets except if trained, safe to do so and only if required to aid evacuation. I have been debating the pros and cons of recommending a change to the rules to allow trained kitchen staff to use the wet chemical extinguishers on the fat fryer.

I am very interested in other people opinion or experiences in this area.

Isn't the whole point of having wet chemical appliances that they are the most effective way of dousing fat fires? I'd get your kitchen staff trained ASAP. They are much more effective on hot fat than any other extinguisher, and safer in use than blankets, even if you would need to replace the oil after use. It's better to have to replace the oil rather than an entire kitchen, surely?

John

Thanks for the responses so far are there any Fire and Rescue people out there who may be able give an opinion.

I have sourced a training supplier now but we are still debating the policy change internally.

Thanks for your response roshqse, I think we will make the change to policy, I especially like "they need to know when to run away" as that follows my thought process.

You will see how quick the flames develop and would catch everything close by.

Compare the time with your evacuation time from sounding the alarm.

Then think about whether to attack the fire.

Of course you can always just close the lid if there is one?

Ah Messy,

You are bang right, but I do wish F&R Services would catch on. We're having a real problem with a service who are asking us to ask workers to check whether a fire is real or not, even if that means opening a fire door into a room where a detector is indicating that there is a fire. One of my team is pretty good on his H&S law (he teaches a law module for the Dip), and that includes fire law. Well, he says, where in the RRO does it say we have to check whether there is s fire; where does it say that we have to train people to use extinguishers. He also wonders why fire crews who wouldn't dream of entering a potential hazard room with full BA etc etc are asking our polyester-overall clad workers to do what they would never dream of doing themselves. Now it is real dilemma for us; we don't want to leave people to die in a burning room (it's an old people home), on the other hand we don't want to double the body count, so we are training people in door cracking, dynamic RA and the like. But my point is, it's our RA, but the fire service insist that we reach pre-determined conclusions, and are threatening us if we don't, and we don't want to establish case law, as it happens, so we do what we are told. If it really was all down to RA, for example, I'd take all the extinguishers out, but of course we can't.

Sorry for the deviation,

John

This particular F&RS is Merseyside, we also come under Herts, Humberside, West Yorks, Aberdeen and some others that I haven't actually had dealings with, and then there's the shops... and they're in practically every F&RS area in the UK. Funnily enough there is less than complete consistency in the way they approach things....

John

Hi Flysafe - having worked in the fire and rescue service for 30 years and an IFE and IOSH member my advice comes from all sides;

I train people on all sorts of fire safety issues and find companies have different policies on fighting fire, what most companies don't realise is that unless faced with a fire there is no knowing how people will react; for instance in a care home where the staff will have a higher interaction with the residence - then there will be (in my experience) more of a want to fight the fire and protect the users; there are of course exceptions; however staff who are trained, preferably by someone with firefighting experience, in fire awareness, emergency procedures and with practical fire extinguisher usage are well prepared to tackle a fire; but if they cannot do so, say because of the size of it, or lack of confidence then the second they realise this there actions should be as per the training - evacuate, close the door if possible, help others out if required or assigned by a PEEP and report to the assemby point.

The main point here is that ALL options should be available to the member of staff that comes across a fire.

Hope this helps/

Taylor-Brown, thanks for that, we'll have a look at the CFOA paper, it might well help us.

Yes, Article 21(1) would certainly apply, but as always the devil is in the detail. The word in the article is 'adequate'; the meaning of this in this context hasn't yet been properly tested in court, and we don't want to be the first to test it. So we do what F&Ross say we should, but adequacy is surely one of the factors which has to be subject to RA. If our RA is that we don't think that extinguishers should be used (which by and large we don't, except as an immediate life-saving provision), then adequate training is minimal. And to my way of thinking, though PUWER might well apply, one way of looking at this is that we remove the equipment, then PUWER does not apply.

CFOA opinion is valuable, but Chief Fire Officers no more know what the law means until a judge says so than we do. We know what we want our workers to be doing in the event of a real hostile fire, and fighting fires isn't part of it; we have vulnerable people to evacuate. There's also plenty of evidence that the first thing some people do with an extinguisher is use it badly (see my post on real world extinguisher use). So we have to assess the risk, as long as our assessment agrees with what the F&RS wants,

John