Sparking interest in Fire Safety

A hotel in Cheshire was fined £75,000 this week for breaching fire regulations after a routine visit by Fire Safety Officers in 2008 closed down the hotel immediately.

They found faulty smoke detectors and substandard fire exits and the third floor failed to have a single working fire alarm. Staff had not been properly trained in fire safety.

The 160 bedroom hotel was given permission to reopen four days later after fixing fire safety problems and installing the required equipment but there are no mentions in the new reports about how they rectified their staff training.

At CPL Training there are two easy options for training employees in Fire Safety:

The first one is to take a one-day face-to-face training course, the Fire Marshal Award. This is a non-incendiary course designed to equip any employee with the knowledge required to enforce fire regulations within the workplace.

The course includes skills such as basic fire-fighting, emergency and evacuation procedures and the correct use of extinguishers through to full-blown fire risk assessments and fire science. The course can be run in-house and on a 24/7 basis. For example. CPL Training have run courses for hotel shift workers in the middle of the night to fit in with their working times.

The second and even more accessible option is to take the online version of the course through the CPL E-Learning website (www.cple-learning.co.uk). This course is available to anyone for just £30 (+ vat) and is filled with images, graphics and tasks to complete with the on screen avatar.

I appreciate this has been a blatant advert for CPL Training but this news story highlights the duty placed on the employee or operator to carry out and continue to monitor fire safety provision. The penalties in this case included a £25k fine for each of the three offences and £53k in cost. Had anyone died or been injured as a result of a fire, the hotel owners could have faced charges under the Corporate Manslaughter legislation with even higher fines.

I hope I’ve sparked your interest in some fire safety training