Fire Warden Coverage

[comatose]

Hi,

I work for a large coporation in the motor industry.

I am finding it challenging to manage fire wardens effectively.

Is there an ideal ratio for this?
Does anyone utilise a live database for their management?
How do you ensure sufficient coverage throughout the entire day?

Thanks

[WillPool]

Hi Comatose, welcome to the forums

What I have done in companies before is work out what I need and then add 25% to ensure that there is coverage at all times including night shift, holidays etc.

A lot will be down to the size of the premises and available staff.

Sorry I don't have a plan or data base

Will

[stephen1974]

I think there are some recommended ratios but not a legal requirement.

For Low, Medium and High Risk premises I seem to recall a ratio of 1 to 50, 20 and 15. However, I also recall other recomendations of doing it per floor, so if you have 50 over 2 floors, its 2 wardens not 1 in a low risk.

Then look at shift work. 2 shifts, double your wardens, 3 shifts, triple it - but obvious you have to have the minimum number on each shift.

Then you have to account for wardens not being on ite (holiday, sickness, meetings, training etc) - add 25% per shift.

Then you have to look at the layout of your building as see if the minimum number is adequate. Maybe you have a weird building shape or dangerous environments.Run drills to test this.

Sorry, i dont see to have my old paperwork that did a full preakdown of stuff.

[Messy]

I cant say I have seen any advice and frankly it would be daft to try and quantify it as it really does depend on risk and what evacuation procedures are in place

A large concert venue with 10s of thousands of people that are unfamiliar with the building will need quite a few wardens at key points to show the way out

An office with 98% staff(2% visitors) who are familiar with the layout so need no guidance, but where wardens are used to sweep an area and ensure it is empty would perhaps need a lower ratio of wardens to evacuees

Then of course there's the resilience issue, made 100 x worse in recent years by working from home, so the amount of trained wardens you have is likely to be considerably more if your firm does lots of WTF

So its really down to you and a risk assessed judgement .... I am sorry this is a bit wooly and vague - but that is the joy of risk assessed based fire safety legislation compared with the old prescriptive nonsense, in that you can decide your own risk and control measures (within reason!!!)

[comatose]

Thank you all for your support.