Innovation Fire Engineering Ltd

Our client for health and safety reasons, wanted to provide security gates on a number of the staircases from the basment car park, to prevent patrons walking in the service yards of the Maylord shopping centre to access and egress these staircases.

We worked with 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 be closed during non fire conditions, cost considerations and their concerns of  malicoius operation of any equipment  provided to open the security gates.

We developed with them, a cost effective practical solution of utilising break glass call points with a clear hinge cover, which would operate the fire alarm system and hence open the security gates in the event of fire. The clear hinge cover would provide a psychological deterrent to prevent 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 that one of the existing staircases was not required as a escape route in the event of fire. Therefore the security gate on this staircase was not required to be linked into the fire alarm system  and a break glass call point was not required. This provided our client with a significant cost saving on the project.