Preparing your Commercial Building for Fire Damage

1/10/2019 (Permalink)

Preparing your Commercial Building for Fire Damage

Is your building prepared for a fire emergency? Fire is a serious risk to the safety of any business, threatening to cause extensive damage to the premises and endanger staff and other people that are on site when a fire breaks out.

Keeping your business prepared for a fire emergency is an important part of being a responsible employer. Being prepared for a serious fire reduces the risk of extensive damage to your building and make staff and emergency rescue workers safer.

In this post, we’ll share three standards that your building should meet in order to become more prepared against the threat of a serious fire. Is your building entirely ready to deal with a serious, unexpected fire breaking out?

 Being fire safe once and lapsing isn’t an option – it’s important to be prepared for a fire emergency at all times.

It’s also important that your building exceeds the fire code’s requirements if you see it as being a potentially risky environment. View the fire code as a minimum level to meet and aim to exceed its requirements to make your building safer for occupants.

Install heat and smoke venting to make firefighting easier

If you own a large commercial or industrial building, installing heat and smoke vents can significantly improve its safety in the event of a large fire breaking out. Heat and smoke vents prevent smoke and heat from being trapped inside your building.

This means that heat can vent out of your building, reducing its interior temperature and preventing fire from spreading laterally throughout the building. Vents also let smoke escape your building, reducing the risk of fatalities from smoke inhalation.

Effective venting also improves visibility inside your building, allowing people to get out of your building in the event of a fire more easily. This increased visibility allows firefighters to more easily navigate your building to extinguish a serious fire.

Finally, heat and smoke venting lets firefighters easily locate the center of a fire in a building. This allows them to respond quicker and start fighting the fire effectively, potentially saving lives and reducing total damage to your building.

Apply extra caution if your building contains flammable materials

Buildings that contain flammable materials such as fuel or materials that burn at a rapid rate need to apply extra caution in dealing with fire. Responding quickly can save lives and prevent flammable materials from contributing to a fire’s spread.

This preparation can involve installing heat and smoke vents to prevent fire from spreading laterally throughout your building, using a more effective alarm system or simply by exceeding the fire code in every respect.

With the right level of monitoring and response, it’s possible to respond to a fire in a tiny amount of time, potentially saving lives and preventing a small fire from turning into a larger, far more dangerous one.

Is your commercial or industrial building as fire safe as it could be?

Being prepared for a fire emergency is an important part of running a responsible, safe and trustworthy business. If a fire were to break out in one of your company’s buildings, would you be fully prepared and ready to respond to it safely?

As many as 50% of businesses close down following a disaster, according to the latest research. Of the businesses that survive, the overwhelming majority of them had a preparedness plan in place. Pre-planning can serve as an insurance policy aimed at peace of mind. And knowing you are "Ready for whatever happens" speaks trust to your clients and employees that in the event your business is affected by a disaster, they don’t necessarily have to be.

By developing a SERVPRO Emergency READY Profile for your business, you minimize business interruption by having an immediate plan of action. Knowing what to do and what to expect in advance is the key to timely mitigation and can help minimize how water and fire damage can affect your business.

Give us a call here at SERVPRO Midtown Memphis  at (901)454-4975 for any questions or to plan your Emergency Ready Plan