Home Improvement
How to Reduce the Risk of Fire in the Home or Business
The risk of a fire outbreak is always eminent in any home or business setup. With electricity and fires around, it is only wise to take the needed measures to keep your structure safe.
Identifying the Risks
- Make sure that you exactly know the fire hazards to the home or office. The presence of electricity and other such aspects increase the risk of fire.
- Upon making a correct identification of the risks, you can then go ahead to reduce or eliminate them from the home or office. For electricity, you can insulate and cover the exposed wires and other items.
- Always try to visualize who is at the highest level of risk. Maybe visitors who come to the home or office, or small kids, or the elderly. Making this diagnosis will help you take the needed steps to reduce the risks to the occurrence of the fire.
- Provide fire precautions to the occupants and visitors to further reduce the likelihood of the fire occurring. This can be in the form of pictures and words that are legible from a distance.
- Make it a routine to review the fire hazards on the home or business premise. It should also be done with every renovation or extension to the current building. With every extension or renovation, there is the likely change in the risk of a fire.
- For each assessment done, there should be a comprehensive report to the right people to make sure that the right steps are taken to reduce the fire hazard. Use land development specialist for a secure asset development project. Never let a needed change be postponed as no one knows when the fire will occur.
Taking Precautions
- Consider parts of the house or building to be resistant to fires. Use materials that will not burn when a fire breaks out. There are many fire resistant materials to build doors and walls in the market at the moment.
- Always make sure you have the routes to safety clear and uncluttered. First, each home or firm should have a fire zone where people can run to in the case of a fire.
- Always have at hand fire extinguishers in the home or office. They should also be of various types to put out different types of fires. There should be a water extinguisher, a powder extinguisher, a carbon dioxide extinguisher and any other.
- Have in place a way to turn on the lights in the case of an emergency. A backup generator may not be a good option since it may lead to a further fire from electric fault. Use portable lights.
- Ensure that every part of the building had fire alarms ready to warn the occupants of any fires. They may be manual ones that need being triggered by hand or automatic ones such as smoke sensors. The latter are the best.
- Let every employee or family member go through a drill on what to do in the case of a fire. This drill should be done as often as possible to keep everyone up to date with their fire-handling skills as needed by the law.
- Any flammable materials should be stored safely in areas with the least risk of fires. Also, label the materials to further reduce the risk of fire hazard. These materials should be preferably kept as close to the outside of the building as possible.
With these steps, one can be sure of having a home or business premise that is safe from fires. Above everything else, train the occupants of the building to act in a certain way in the case of a fire to reduce the risk on human life.