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Phlosophy on Fires
When discussing fires and disasters, one often
hears certain expressions:
!
The thief takes your TV, but the fire will
take your son.
If you yourself as a person or a close relative
have been exposed to a fire or if you hear of disasters in hotels or
fires on ships where hundreds of people have been killed you are
immediately frightened and shocked.
You try to imagine how terrible it must be to
suffocate from smoke or be fried by the heat from a fire.
What if one of my children were there. You do
want to think like that – the mere thought hurts.
Maybe you start thinking about your own fire
protection
Then the questions :
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How could this happen?
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How and why did the fire start?
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Was it possibly arson?
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Was it carelessness or lack of supervision?
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If on public premises. Who was really
responsible for the fire protection?
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Who is to blame for what happened?
After a day you will hear the experts and the
responsible authorities, politicians and maybe the insurance companies.
What they say is usually the following:
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"The building was built according to current
standards."
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The vessel was "classified" according to
Lloyds.
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The Rescue Services say: "When we arrived it
was all in flames, we were too late!"
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Maybe someone will add: "We had been
recommended smoke detectors, but they fell outside the construction
budget, so none were installed."
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Someone expresses, however, with relief: "The
insurance will give us £ .5,000,000 to cover
the damage!"
After some time comes the pale cast of thought,
and new appearance in press and on TV.
What should be done to prevent similar accidents from happening again
are brought up in discussion panels.
The authorities are contacted to consider
"revision or improvement of the regulations” or if "you should just
check that the current rules are adhered to."
Unfortunately the incident is forgotten – or
maybe this is just as well – as time goes by and other events enter the
first page in the newspapers.
The accident has taken place, we must look
forward. But what have you lost?
If someone has died, the damage is irreparable for those closely related.
There is no insurance to cover the loss of a loved one. It makes no
sense accusing any authority.
If the material losses are considerable you may be able to get financial
compensation through insurances, but under the circumstances there is
much that cannot be replaced by money.
You may lose customers and you
may lose irreplaceable cultural values and many other things.
When it comes to fire there are no winners. All
are losers!
Preventive fire protection!
Even if you have a good insurance, this is not free!
If the damages become too large the
insurance companies will raise the insurance premiums, and as a result
of this all will have to pay more.
What you have to invest in above all is the prevention activities.
In all municipalities there is some form of rescue or fire service, and
one of their most important tasks is to "prevent the fire" in various
ways.
This is unfortunately not always common knowledge.
One generally believes that the Fire Department's main task is to
extinguish fires and save lives.
Obviously these are very large tasks, but we
often hear that lacking resources for prevention means that the focus
must be on pure rescue.
It is therefore not fire brigades that to any
great extent can to work with prevention against fire. According to the
law this duty falls upon the "owner or owners of the building" who are
responsible for the fact that the fire protection within the object is
sufficient and appropriate to the activity.
There are various methods of preventing fires:
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Risk awareness of those responsible
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Good order
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Procedures for monitoring and surveillance
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Motivation and training of staff
If you can follow a combination of the above,
there is a good chance a fire will not occur and you have succeeded with
your preventive measures and "nothing happened".
Goals:
Our goal should then be if you think about preventive
measures as follows:
My home or my business will never
catch fire!
This is unfortunately not a realistic goal.
It is not better than the zero-vision
in traffic!
Fires will start.
Not least arson which is a very big
and growing.
So we must accept that fires start. We cannot
prevent them from occurring, but what we can do is to reduce the effects
fires.
If there is a fire and there is no person around
to act, a disaster can easily become a reality.
The fire itself need not be particularly
extensive. It depends on what is burning.
Small fires often develop vast amounts of smoke
with a great amount of soot, damage by corrosion, put to sleep, and at
worst kill. |
