Posted By Lulu
Would appreciate your opinion on this situation.

Scenario is a large 4 storey Victorian house which is being used as offices. The layout is much as it would have been when it was a domestic residence with lots of rooms opening onto central hallways. Each room houses one to 5 desks depending on its size.

Every room has a door and they have a fire door sign on but most are merely old and heavy panelled wooden doors with no tumescent strip and some even have keyholes through them! Many are kept propped open to allow air to circulate when it is warm.

Additional doors have been added to separate the basement and the attic floor and these are proper fire doors. Between the ground and first floor there is a large open (and quite magnificent) wooden stairway so are not separated by any kind of fire break.

There are no internal fire break walls as such although all walls are of solid construction (not plasterboard partitions) but they do have small gaps and spaces to allow plumbing pipes and wiring through.

There are small rooms/walk in cupboards that house electrical panels and servers for the computers and these too have gaps where smoke or flames could spread. They have no automatic fire detection in them although the rooms and corridors nearby do.

My questions are this

1. Do all the internal doors need to be fire doors? If not which should be?
2. Do all the gaps in internal walls need to be stopped to slow fire spread or just some of them (creating compartments within the building)
3. Should the rooms with electric panels be fire proofed and have fire detection installed

Thanks

Posted By GT
Dear Lulu,

Have you or are you conducting a fire risk assessment?

How many people is the building going to accommodate.

What are the travel distances to the nearest protected escape route.

What means do you have for raising the warning of fire.

Is there any non combustible material in the structure or is it all combustible wooden wall panels/flock wall papers etc.

The panel doors you are talking about may have been modified to a half hour fire resisting standard or maybe acceptable due to the material and workmanship of the construction.

However, your first move should be to check with local authority Building Regs / fire authority.

Regards


GT

Posted By Lulu
Thanks for the reply

Here are the answers to your questions

Have you or are you conducting a fire risk assessment? I am preparing to do one.

How many people is the building going to accommodate. Up to 30

What are the travel distances to the nearest protected escape route. Evacuation time to outside is 1 minute 45 seconds (or less) based on recent fire drills

What means do you have for raising the warning of fire. Automatic fire detection and alarms in most but not all areas

Is there any non combustible material in the structure or is it all combustible wooden wall panels/flock wall papers etc. I think internal walls are of brick construction but a lot of combustible materials within the building

How can I tell if doors conform to Fire Door spec? As I said some have keyholes so surely they cannot be adequate?

Posted By shaun mckeever
Lulu

You are probably ok but just check to make sure that the height of the building does not mean you need alternative exit routes. If the height of the floor of the top floor is more than 11m from the ground then you should be looking at alternative exit routes from the upper floor.

All doors onto the staircase must be fire doors and must be kept shut. Depending on your fire alarm system you may also have to have a lobby approach to the stairs. You do not say what type of fire alarm you have - is it a property protection system or a life safety system? If life safety is it L2 or L3 (unlikely to be L1).

Travel distances must not be measured in time but in actual distance travelled.

Each floor must be fire resisting so any services passing through the floors need to be fire stopped. If it is timber flooring is it close boarded or tongue and grooved. You will need to know this for your fire risk assessment.

It sounds to me like the doors you refer to are unlikley to be fire doors. If you have a single staircase then intumescent seals and cold smoke strips are required. Are the doors listed or in fact is any part of the building listed?

If you are conducting the fire risk assessment I would say you need to do more background reading, some of the questions you have asked indicate that maybe you have not sufficient depth of knowledge to undertake the assessment yet.

Posted By Lulu
PS building not listed as far as I am aware