Fire Safety in the Close Protection Industry

The role of the close protection operator is to keep their client safe. Moreover, this safety focuses primarily on reducing the likelihood of a physical attack against the principal. Plus, ensuring that you reduce the chances of a traffic collision as much as is reasonably within your control.

There is often an overlooked aspect of safety management that close protection operators rarely consider, and that is fire safety. In fact, which under certain circumstances can have catastrophic consequences in the event of an incident.

The Crans-Montana fire in Switzerland on New Years Eve, was started by indoor pyrotechnics in an overcrowded bar. Specifically, the resulting fire led to the death of 40 people and it injured 116, 83 of whom were treated for serious burns.

It would appear that there would have been some obvious aspects of fire safety that fire safety professionals should have picked up on. Moreover. but would a close protection operator have been aware of this to the extent that they could make a reasoned argument with their principal to leave the premises.

You could get quite technical in doing this. Furthermore, but as 99% of close protection operators don’t have a level 3 or above fire safety qualification. you can use common sense to come up with sound reasoning to establish the level of potential fire safety management that should be in place at a venue.

Could you evacuate quickly?

If you are in a location, does it look like you could evacuate that location quickly during a real emergency evacuation scenario. Additionally, clearly, the more exits, or operable windows, the better.

Are the exits wide enough?

Do the exits look like they are at a width that could support a swift evacuation of the occupants. Importantly, or is it likely that people would end up bottlenecked at the exit points as they tried to get out.

Is the venue overcrowded

Does the location look to be over crowded. In fact, fire safety management to some extent is based around occupancy levels. If the location looks over crowded, it’s unlikely that the current fire safety mitigation measures in place were designed for that many people.

If you combine these first three points. Notably, you should be able to work out the likelihood of a quick evacuation in the event of an incident. If it’s overcrowded, there are minimal exits, and those exits aren’t particularly wide, then you have a problem.

Bottlenecks and fire safety

The Crans-Montana fire occurred in the basement of a bar, with one primary access / egress point. Specifically, of which had been halved in size during previous renovations, and the venue was overcrowded. 34 of the 41 victims were found piled up at the bottom of the staircase.

What could you do on the recce phase to support fire safety

You can take this further, especially if you get chance for a recce. In fact, in a location like this, you’d expect that the fire risk assessment. or fire risk assessment review, would have been completed as a minimum of every two years. So if you ask to see the fire risk assessment and it’s out of date. it could give you an idea of the standard of fire safety management at the venue.

Fire extinguisher servicing records

In the UK, accepted industry best practice is that fire extinguishers have to be serviced annually. Importantly, and the record of this is displayed on the fire extinguisher. So if the fire extinguisher annual servicing is out of date. it could also give you an idea of the standard of fire safety management at the venue. You wouldn’t have to ask to see these records, so if you’d prefer not to ask to see the fire risk assessment. you could just look at the fire extinguisher records as part of your venue familiarisation.

Why not complete some fire safety CPD

It’s unlikely that fire safety will become a prevalent qualification that close protection operators will look to achieve. Moreover, but it’s worth doing some CPD so at least you understand the basics of fire safety like we have discussed in the article. As a minimum, think of it like security management, if it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t, so it’s time to leave.

If this article has raised questions about your own security, find out more about our event security services or our security consultancy - or get in touch to discuss your requirements directly.