Draft London Safety Plan 2010/2013 - Fire Brigades Union London

MAPPING OUR PREVENTION PRIORITIES
To prepare for our community and regulatory safety
strategies, (published in November 2008), we mapped
out the whole of our service by looking at the numbers
and different types of incidents we attend and the
number of casualties they cause. We can then consider
what, if anything, we could do, or wanted to do, to
prevent them. An illustrative chart of that data is
represented below.
From this work we have determined our prevention
priorities as follows;
1. Fires – we attend around 600 fires a week, with a
casualty rate of around five
casualties for every 100 incidents.
1000
Our approach to preventing fire
focuses on the places and causes
where we think education (or
regulation) will change behaviour to
100
avoid unnecessary fires.
2. False alarms to automatic fire
Advice
alarms – we encourage the
installation of fire detection and
10
alarm systems as the early warning
they give is vital to preventing harm
and reducing damage. However,
1
where automatic fire alarm systems
are installed in non-domestic
buildings they can often be
inadequately maintained, poorly positioned or
negligently activated. These situations give rise to
around 1,000 false alarm calls per week. These false
alarms are an unnecessary demand on our resources
and we believe proper managerial controls by their
owners will reduce these calls.
3. People shut in lifts– we attend around 250 calls to
people shut in lifts each week. We will always
respond to these types of calls where there is a
genuine emergency but there are a number of
buildings in London where poor maintenance and
managerial control means we are repeatedly
attending to faulty lifts. We have begun to take
action to reduce our attendance to calls where there
is no immediate emergency and to charge those who
persistently neglect to make better maintenance
arrangements.
4. Malicious calls – we have been very successful in
reducing the number of hoax calls we attend, but we
will continue to educate, identify and prosecute
individuals who make hoax calls.
5. Transport incidents (which includes road traffic
accidents) – Road traffic accidents cause more
Incidents per week (average)
Automatic fire alarm
Good intent false alarm
Malicious false alarm
15
casualties than any other incident type we attend.
We believe that many more of these incidents should
and can be prevented and that those bodies charged
with road, transport and traffic management can
have the most impact on achieving that. However,
we are very keen to work with them on programmes
and initiatives that they design and implement.
Together, these five incident types account for around 78
per cent of the incidents we attend and 85 per cent of all
casualties 3 we attend.
Figure 2: graphical representation of our
Mapping our prevention priorities (whole of service)
Persons shut in lifts
Flooding or water provision
Animal rescue
prevention priorities
No action required
3 If transport incidents are excluded, then we are directly trying
to prevent around 75 per cent of the incidents we attend and 31
per cent of the casualties.
Fires
Effecting entry or exit
Making safe
Transport incidents
Assistance to people
0.00 0.01 0.10 1.00 10.00 100.00
Casualties per 100 incidents (average)