Everyone is at risk if there is a fire. Fires destroy property, cause injuries, and take lives. One of the key strategies to maintaining a safe workplace and preventing fires is fire safety training. With proper training workers can eliminate fire hazards and respond quickly and efficiently if a fire breaks out. Without proper training a small occurrence can quickly grow to become a major incident with devastating outcomes. Fire safety training can teach workers how to recognize fire hazards, conduct a fire safety risk assessment, prevent a workplace fire, and respond if a fire occurs.
You learn to recognize fire hazards by conducting a fire safety risk assessment. All fires start when heat (a source of ignition) comes into contact with fuel (anything that burns) and oxygen is present. To prevent a fire the goal is to keep sources of ignition and fuel apart.
It’s important that everyone in the workplace knows how to respond if a fire occurs. Workers need to know what to do in case a fire occurs and how to work together to effectively stop the advance of a fire.
Through fire safety training, workers learn:
- The company’s emergency plan
- The worker’s role in the emergency plan
- How to activate the fire alarm so the occupants of the building can escape
- To close all doors behind them as they immediately leave the area
- Where designated assembly areas are located outside the building
- What to do if they encounter heat or smoke upon exiting
- How to fight a small fire with a portable extinguisher
Workers and employers need to take fire drills seriously and learn from them to improve their response. By practicing what to do in a fire, flaws in the emergency plan can be revealed and those faults can then be addressed. Practice also builds confidence and helps keep everyone calm in the event of a real fire.
To ensure that your workers are fully aware of the risk of fire and the safest way to deal with it, get in touch with the professionals at Fire Control Systems today for more information on our fire safety training courses!