Fire Escape

This post is being written after the shocking news of 6 deaths and 2 critical injuries in a fire at the weekend.

Any death caused by fire is tragic but with the right precautions surely these deaths are preventable.  The cause of the fire in this instance was apparently a fridge or freezer that burst into flames during the night.  The result was that the whole house was engulfed in flames and the tragedies occurred.

One person escaped using the primary escape route - the ground floor door - the second was forced to jump from a first floor window and was critically injured.

The question to be asked is would the outcome of this been different if there had been working smoke alarms, a fact that I do not know,  and a secondary escape route - with a fire escape, be it fixed or portable, from the first floor.

I dont like to use situations like these to bang the drum for Fire Escape but the reality is that perhaps the tragedies could have been reduced and the occupants could have escaped.

I have two hard wired smoke alarms that are tested weekly and a fire escape ladder on my house.  My family also know what to do in the event of a fire and are practised and confident at using the ladder.

The Fire Service work extremely hard to educate and try and prevent these accidents but there is another route that I firmly believe should be progressed and that is the Building Regulations.  If the regulations stipulated some form of secondary means of escape  then the awareness of this issue would be raised.

The current regulations stipulate hard wired smoke alarms and fire escape windows but the do not take into account how to get out.  It is apparently deemed acceptable to exit a first floor window from 4.5 metres and get safely to ground level.

Just look out of your bedroom window and ask yourself if you would want to get out from that height.

There are approximately 13 500 injuries and 500 deaths in the UK every year and I for one believe that some of these are preventable.