Archive for August, 2010

The Safety Issue Relating to Fire Extinguishers

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Across the world the issue of fire awareness remains a highly important issue in the business environment but unfortunately one that still gets neglected. The result of neglecting your fire risk commitments might also lead to devastating situations such as damage to, or even complete loss of property and in the very situation deaths.

Whether you are a manager, boss or gaffer of a business with employees then you have a duty of care to all those employees in the working environment. Part an parcel of your responsibilities should be to conduct a fire risk assessment, which involves a close analysis of the entire area where employees are expected to work to highlight every possible fire hazard. By conducting this fire risk assessment you can then evaluate exactly what fire safety devices you will need to fight fire issues should they ever arise.

By far and away the best way to conduct a good fire risk assessment is to get the assistance of an expert, in loads of cases the local fire brigade can offer professional and expert assistance. Of course you can do the review internally with your own staff but it goes without saying that skilled advice will offer you and your employees that extra support that the fire risk assessment will have been completely to a high standard.

Once the assessment has been completed you can then move onto purchasing the right fire extinguisher to suit the needs of your business environment. For example you wouldn’t want to utilise a water fire extinguisher to control a small notebook or electrical fire, quite simply water on an electrical fire could spark even more disaster and of course the risk of electric shock to the individual using the fire extinguisher. For this type of occasion you would need ideally a Co2 fire fighting equipment which has the ability to very quickly combat the fire by speedily reducing the objects core temperature, thus stopping the fire and sinking the potential re-lighting of the fire hazard. The value of carbon dioxide extinguishers is so powerful in reducing the core temperature of the target has even seen them being misused in ridiculous circumstances such as cooling down cold beverages and bottles of wine and spirits, quite a crazy and inappropriate use of a piece of fire fighting equipment.

Many types of fire extinguisher exist including carbon dioxide fire extinguishers.
There are many varieties of fire fighting equipment from the wet chemical extinguishers to the very fashionable dry powder types of fire fighting gear. The good point to the dry powder extinguishers is there knack to handle most types of fire situations however the minus point is the damage they cause to the backdrop. For example if you used a dry powder fire extinguisher to put out a little office fire started in a basket, the consequential action would be winning situation on the small fire on the other hand if you had any computer equipment in the area such as laptops then there is a strong prospect of the dry powder getting into the internal components of the computer gear thus potentially ruining it. A big part of the fire risk exercise should be to put in place the right extinguisher.