Growing demand for luxury apartments has highlighted the need for more flexible fire safety designs. Stewart Dabin explores the issues, from restrictive guidance to the maintenance of safety systems.

Does the Pitt Review go far enough?

David Lane takes a closer look at the findings of Sir Michael Pitt’s report on last year’s UK flood responses and calls for a single agency to be given primacy in managing inland water rescue operations.

AUTHOR

David Lane, formerly a Senior Fire Officer, is the Managing Director of Lane, Jefferies & Associates, a specialist fire, water and marine safety consultancy. He is also a film producer and organises the Flood Fighters series of conferences with CRJ.

Tony Oliver reports on the New Year’s Eve fire in Bangkok, which killed 66 people, and finds the usual morass of allegations regarding permits violated, safety rules flouted, and inadequate fire safety measures that are so common after such events, wherever they happen in the world

This Code provides guidance for the formulation of a crisis management plan.  It covers guidance to assess and analyse the type of threats that may be faced and how to mitigate these threats by a combination of prevention and protection techniques. The resultant exposure to a crisis should then be covered by the crisis management plan encompassing preparation, response, recovery and testing.

This document is written to apply to most types of organisation, enforcing bodies, etc. and should be applied as deemed appropriate to the circumstances of the organisation.  In addition, due to the fact that this document does not rely on national codes, it can be applied internationally.

The dangers of “cheap and cheerful” Fire Risk Assessments

A personal perspective by Paul Bryant

Paul is the CEO of Kingfell plc Fire Engineering & Risk Specialists and is the current Chairman of the Rail Industry Fire association (RIFA).

Paul formed Kingfell in 1995 and has built it up into a multi-million pound turnover organisation that it is today specialising in fire, risk and crisis control.

 Train crash lpg blaze.

‘Inferno’, ‘apocalypse’ and ‘hell on earth’ are some of the terms used to describe the devastating forest fi res which broke out across Greece and claimed at least 68 victims, many of them children, writes Ioannis Kapakis

When a freight train carrying ethanol left the track between Cherry Valley and Rockford, causing a massive fire, strong co-operative emergency response ensured the incident was handled effectively, says Chief Craig Wilt.