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| 'Fire Safety in Sleeping Accommodation' will help hotel industry take required measures |
The free seminar the last in a series presented throughout 2010 is entitled 'Fire Safety in Sleeping Accommodation' and will take place at Blackpool Football Club on Tuesday 30 November.
The Fire Industry Association (FIA) and the British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA) have joined forces to present a seminar aimed at raising awareness of fire safety in owners of hotels, guest houses, holiday flats, caravan parks and Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs).
The free seminar the last in a series presented throughout 2010 - is entitled 'Fire Safety in Sleeping Accommodation' and will take place at Blackpool Football Club on Tuesday 30 November. It is designed to provide all the latest information for the responsible person in such accommodation to ensure that their guests/residents and their staff are protected from the threat of fire.
The 'Sleeping Accommodation' sector identified within the Fire Safety Order is under the spotlight due to a number of high profile fires in recent years. In fact hotels have long posed a particular problem in terms of fire safety - it was a hotel fire in Saffron Walden on Boxing Day 1969, resulting in the death of 11 people, that gave the final impetus to the passing of the Fire Precautions Act in 1971. A year later, hotels and boarding houses were the first premises to be designated as requiring a fire certificate under the Act. Bringing it more up to date, UK fire statistics for 2007 help to demonstrate that the problem has certainly not gone away: some 1,800 hotel fires (including boarding houses and hostels) and 1,200 fires in caravans.
Becky Reid, Marketing Manager with the FIA, comments "This is the last in a series of six seminars we have presented as joint FIA/BAFSA initiatives in 2010. The focus for this year has been on the care home and sleeping accommodation sectors as they were both identified as areas where fires continue to be a particular threat. This time the focus is hoteliers in all their guises and whatever the size of their business, from the large hotel through to the one bedroom guest house. Given the significant concentration of such businesses in Blackpool (with their respective building designers and consultants who would also benefit from attending), we have chosen a venue which will help us to get the fire safety message across to what I am sure will be a sizeable audience."
Amongst the topics being discussed are an owner's legal obligations under the Fire Safety Order, the role of fire risk assessments, fire detection and alarm systems, sprinklers, fire fighting by staff, means of escape and the importance of third party certification.
