Morning all,

I have done a search and this topic gives me no results but I am sure its been asked so appologies.

We have a small warehouse and office. The office is on 2 floors. There is a fire warden for each area. When it comes to the day-to-day staff signining in and out it doesn't work as no one likes doing it (politics, etc). So I was thinking that if our proceedure is that in the event of a evacuation the fire wardne does a sweep of their specific area only which is relativly small and would take 2-3 minutes max would this surrfice rather than doing a full roll call as well?

The warehouse stores nothing harmful just metal automotive components so the risk of an actual fire is very low.

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

As Biker said, registers are great in theory but in reality they are rarely any use. This is because:

• Most places have more than one exit and assembly point, so where do you take the register?
• People move around; I can’t see how you make them update the register every time they move in/out and around.
• It is  impossible to manage if you have a significant number of visitors or public
• They create a false sense of security; you assume that if they are not on the register they are not in the building

The only way to do it to use sweeps, but you also need engagement from your staff who should check up on each other.  

Thunderchild

I think that sweep system is also more likely to adequately cover visitors.

All our staff have swipe cards for entry, but only need to use these if noone else has opened the door.

Asking them to all swipe out for exit would slow our evacuation quite dramatically.

P

One place I know (a large building in Westminster involved in government) has arranged for EVERYBODY(well as many as possible) to be trained as a fire warden.  The fire warden's kit (high viz, walkie-talkie, megaphone etc) sits beside the exit and the first person there picks it up and becomes fire warden for the event.

Originally Posted by: A Kurdziel

One place I know (a large building in Westminster involved in government) has arranged for EVERYBODY(well as many as possible) to be trained as a fire warden.  The fire warden's kit (high viz, walkie-talkie, megaphone etc) sits beside the exit and the first person there picks it up and becomes fire warden for the event.

Go on, name names!!! 

I also work in a very large building with 100s of staff on each floor and many thousands overall. I could not justify spending that much money on training and retraining fire wardens.

We have 16-20 on each floor, which is more than enough to cover holidays corse and sickness. As a taxpayer I am not happy with this excessive overspend. The Goverment bean counters are now pushing more and more a 'hot desking' which is a pain when training fire wardens as you cannot have any confidence your fire wardens in The Finance Dept, wont be sharing space with HR 3 floors way. Maybe this is what is happning here

Mind you, I cannot imagine which building it is, as other than the Parlimentary Estate with it's HUGE fire team, from what I have seen, quite a lot of the Govt estate is really poorly run fire safety wise

The place i work at is a 3 storey office building, we have hot desking and agile working so people move around. We currently use what they call an Orange card system, on my floor, the top floor there are 3 of these cards by the exits. They have a card number and tell the person picking the card up what areas to look through. They then tell you what to do next i.e meet the peron in control at the assembly point. I have also worked at a place where a list is printed automaticly for roll call. Having never seen the card system before when i started i was a bit dubious about it but it works well for us. 

I recently started casual work as a Fire Safety Steward at a premier league football stadium.

54000 fans attend every home game and there are about 800 stewards plus other staff.

We have a very good system and everyone is trained what they have to do in a fire alarm operation.  Coded messages etc.

In case of full evacuation we have a Sweep system, every fire steward has his/her designated area, not too large but includes toilets, tea bars etc.

Stadium empties in about 6 minutes, no assembly/roll call for the fans but stewards reporting to Head and deputy head stewards who report up the line.

I am told it works but yet to see it in action.

Prevention is better than cure, as they say.