Maylord Shopping Centre

For health and safety reasons, our client wanted to provide security gates on a number of staircases from the basement car park to prevent patrons from walking in to the service yards of the shopping centre.  This would ensure that patrons only utilised the central staircase to access and egress the shopping centre.

Innovation Fire Engineering listened to our client to fully understand their needs and developed a solution that balanced their requirements for the security gates to be open in the event of a fire and closed at other times with the concerns of malicious operation of any equipment provided to open the gates.

We worked closely with our client to develop a cost-effective, practical solution by utilising break glass call points with clear hinge covers, which would operate the fire alarm system in the event of a fire and enable the security gates to open. The clear hinge cover would provide a psychological deterrent to the malicious operation of the break glass call points to open the security gates in non fire conditions.

We also assessed the current means of escape from the basement car park and justified the removal of one of the existing staircases, which was not required as an escape route in the event of a fire. This provided our client with a significant cost saving, as there was now no requirement for a security gate to be linked into the fire alarm system  nor  a break glass call point.