Good Afternoon all, We are currently discussing the positives and negatives of a role call and a sweep within our organisation. We would like to know what your views are on the matter whether you would do a role call or a fire marshal undertaking an area sweep or both, along with your reasons. Thank you in advance Lewis

It depends on whether you can provide a confident answer to the question "is everybody safe?" For premises with much visitor and staff traffic during the working day the preferred approach is likely to be a fire marshall physical check (eg healthcare, education, retail) whilst a high security site with reliable in/out records may not need much more than a check of the roll.

Sweeps. Every time. For 20 years I ran 6 monthly evacuation exercises and the role-call NEVER came up 100%. Not even a system for swipe-card access to the site. Someone always forgot their card and were "swiped in" by a colleague. Sweeps must be trained to be aware of "suspicious" areas, not to sweep them and simply report them to the fire brigade as "not checked"

I agree - Unless your booking in/out system is as airtight as a gas cylinder, it cannot be relied on. All of our buildings use a sophisticated ID card swipe system. Nobody gets in without one and visitors will be accompanied. Even if staff 'pop out' for a ciggy, they swipe out and back in. So it seems a perfect set up for a roll call But we operate a sweep system on 100% of all sites. We have found it the only way to give a current/reliable evacuation situation report to the fire service. We do have occasions where some areas are not swept (those which are sparsely occupied such as plant rooms and meeting room areas), or if there's a rare & unforeseen shortage of fire wardens. In that case, like Merv above, the fire service get a 'not checked' message and alternative messages are put in place