Management

Steps to Take to Prepare Your Employees for Fire Safety

Fire Safety

While business strategies and operations hold major importance, ensuring safety of the employees is equally crucial. Every workplace comprises major fire hazards. This is especially true for industrial worksites that deal in combustible materials like oil, gas etc.

All employers should implement the necessary steps to ensure that their staff is protected from fire hazards. This will also help employers meet certain standards of the protocol as specified by law.

There are various steps that you can take as an employer for fire prevention and safety. Let’s take a look at these here.

Proper Storage of Materials

Fire can result from the most unexpected of actions or substances. Therefore, it is vital to take all the actions necessary to prevent such an incident. One of the best ways to prevent a fire is by storing combustible materials in their designated places when they are no longer being used. Materials like paper etc. can catch fire quickly. Therefore, these should not be strewn around. These should be disposed of in the right places.

Heavy machinery or other equipment should be placed in their locations once they have fulfilled their purposes. Additionally, materials should be stored in such a way that they can be located easily when they are required.

Install Smoke Detectors

Smoke detectors should be installed on every floor of the workplace. These should be placed at the proper sections of each floor. For example, installing them near the storage spaces of combustible materials is recommended. The smoke detectors should have alarms to signal the staff about a possible fire hazard.

There are various kinds of fire alarms available in the market. For example, ionization alarms, photoelectric alarms and so on can be used for different purposes. It is important to understand the requirement and choose these carefully.

Also, the batteries of these detectors and alarms should be checked from time to time to ensure that they are working and would provide the required support during a fire hazard.

Training the Employees

Fire safety measures can hardly be of any use unless the employees are trained to respond to the incident. The first step is to train your employees how to use a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguishers should be kept in plain sight and should be easily accessible for your staff.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM6plY45Hhs]

People tend to panic as soon as they come to know of a fire incident in the building. Panic affects the decisions-making process adversely. Therefore, a group of your employees should be assigned the job of giving out instructions to the rest of the staff about what to do in the event of a fire.

Your employees should be trained about how to react to a fire. They should know that taking the elevator can be risky at that moment. They should take the stairs at that time. Additionally, employees should know that rushing will only limit their ability to exit the building quickly.

After evacuation, one of your employees should immediately call the fire authority, medical services and other important services.

In addition to making the employees aware of the risks of fire hazards, periodic refresher training should be conducted in order to equip employees with the right skills as the level of risk increases.

Conduct Fire Drills

Making the rules and training your employees are not enough to ensure fire safety. Your employees should be able to execute these steps appropriately. One of the best ways to implement this is by conducting fire drills. This will help in ensuring that your employees know what to do as soon as a fire alarm sounds.

Additionally, employees should be aware of a designated location a little distance away from the building where they should assemble once they exit the worksite to ensure maximum safety. The more your employees practice, the easier it will be for them to respond to a fire.

Vehicular Accidents

Many companies provide vehicles for the transportation of goods. Vehicular fires are quite common. Drivers should be aware of the steps that they should take in that event. Apart from that, vehicular accidents can occur at any time and drivers should be prepared for those. Accident investigation is an important step that should be taken after an accident.

These steps will help in ensuring that your employees are safe.

This content has been written by Katie Smith for Lerablog on behalf of firesafetyconsultant.com

If you have any questions, please ask below!