All staff require Fire Awareness Training but how many Wardens will be required?
The terms Fire Warden and Fire Marshal are often confused, in the main it is personal preference what you call staff that are nominated with specific duties with regard to fire. However, the terms are often used to differentiate between the two aspects of the role the ‘proactive’ day-to-day duties (Fire Warden) and the ‘reactive’ role during a fire alarm/emergency (Fire Marshal).
In general Fire Wardens are people nominated to ensure a satisfactory level of fire safety is maintained within a specified area (or zone) within an organisation. It is important for an organisation to be able to demonstrate that proper training by a ‘competent person’ has been undertaken for audit purposes as part of their overall fire strategy.
The first thing you need to do is to decide how to break your building down into zones or areas, each of these areas should be small enough for one Fire Marshal to search in under 2 minutes, the size, complexity. Height of ceilings etc. are all factors that have to be taken into account.
Example: a building used as offices that has three floors of 10 metres by 40 metres each, might require 2 Marshals per floor, one of these Wardens may be nominated to perform as the ‘Head Warden’ so you will need 6. You will need to factor in shifts, absences/leave, staff turnover etc. and this should be considered for each floor. It might be that you have 14 trained in total to provide effective resilience.
Employers need to be mindful of resilience, ask yourself ‘How robust are my fire strategies?’
It might be that you employ some kind of ‘Zone-Card’ system, so that as staff come in at the commencement of the shift, Fire Wardens will pick up their zone cards form reception, therefore if a Fire Warden is on leave or sick, the Zone Card(s) left will serve as a visual reminder that a zone/area within the premises has no Fire Warden on duty.
Contact us if you would like to discuss a system that would work for your building.
