Fire Safety Management in India: A Review

Abstract

Fire is something that can be expected at any structure, may be at your home or at your workplace, or in a hospital, or in public places, almost anywhere. Fire in any kind of occupancy would certainly have the potential to cause harm to its occupants and severe damage to property. Due to fire and related causes in India itself, almost 25,000 fatalities are occurring every year. On an average, around 21 males and 42 females die each day because of such fire and similar causes and thereby made the concept of fire safety management an area of concern for Indian scenario. Fire safety management in building basically is a day-to-day management concept for aligning a building’s fire safety procedures in place so that they can be used at the time of need. This is moreover a responsibility of each and every individual to restrict any flaws in the fire safety procedures and to prevent any fire occurrences from happening and as being a human being to protect the lives in such situations. No matter how good active and passive fire protection systems you are having in place, it all becomes useless once the people who are supposed to use it are unaware of how to use them in need and are unaware of the significance of the use of such systems and their role in fire prevention and suppression. For solving all the above-stated problems, a proper fire safety management program should be established in the building in order to get all the things right in the case of a fire outbreak. For the purpose of ensuring a 100% safety from fire in the building, we would say a healthy fire safety management system is essential. Various views on fire safety management are reviewed in this paper. The applicability of this management system is different in case of existing buildings and new buildings. Engineering strategy is applied at the design level of fire safety provisions. A fire manual with clearly stated objectives should be given. In case of existing buildings, a ranking system should be set in place in order to check the present fire safety provisions, and at the same time, new fire codes must be tallied for active fire protection system. Along with this, a safety management system for fire is to be brought into the picture. A fire safety plan should be made with fire safety design methodology.