It’s Electrical Fire Safety Week from November 23 and residential landlords and business owners are being reminded of the importance of carrying out fire risk assessments and ensuring they have compliant up-to-date fire monitoring systems in place.
A joint initiative by the Home Office’s Fire Kills campaign and national electrical safety charity, Electrical Safety First, the week highlights the dangers posed by using faulty electrical appliances and overloading sockets.
Around 4,000 blazes every year are caused by electrical issues, according to the Home Office, with 215 people dying in house fires between June 2018 and June 2019.
Electrical Safety First, the campaigning name for the Electrical Safety Council, says more than half of all accidental house fires have an electrical cause at their root, with nine out of ten electrical fires caused by appliances.
It has created a number of online tools aimed at helping householders avoid devastating fires in their homes – such as a socket calculator, a product recall checker and a ‘Check It Out‘ plug-in enabling buyers to identify whether products are being sold by third parties rather than legitimate suppliers.
As well as ensuring the fires don’t happen in the first place, fire detection and life safety specialist CDS stresses the importance of installing and maintaining fire monitoring technology such as smoke alarms, sprinklers and remote 4G and 3G early warning monitoring systems.
The government’s Fire Kills campaign says householders are more than eight times more likely to die in a fire if they don’t have a correctly positioned, working smoke alarm.
CDS has been providing expert fire safety advice – from fire risk assessments, to specifying, monitoring and maintaining all aspects of a fire safety system – for more than 30 years to social housing providers, councils, police authorities, hospitals, care homes, universities, factories, warehouses and airports.
