Implementation of Fire Warden System

[Jeffrey Atkinson <jatkin@spartan.ac.brocku.ca>]

To All;

	I've just joined this group recently and for the very selfish
reason of needing real professional help and experience in emergency
planning.

	By way of introduction:  I've been Chair of the Science Safety
Committee at Brock for the last couple of years and I have learned a great
deal about issues in science lab safety, chemical waste handling and
various sundry other sins that effect a science faculty.  Recently, under
the urging of Valerie Wolfe our university safety officer, we have begun to
review and update our schools fire safety program.  We have discussed many
of the general issues and a timetable of implementation and are now at the
stage of sub-committees addressing various issues such as signage, alarm
testing and maintenance, and (most important to me) the creation of fire
wardens.

	It sounded so simple when we started.  Very quickly we realized
that we need some input from others with systems in place.  Some of the
main questions that we had are;

1.  How are wardens assigned to various buildings, i.e. by number of people
needed to supervise in case of an evacuation, number of rooms that can be
visited in less than 3 minutes or so, or number of exits available in this
space and time? (We realize that not all buildings are created equal.  My
particular interest would be in laboratories and dense office populations.)

2.  Is it best to have as many wardens as possible, possibly in teams, or
is that just redundant?  Like many of you I would guess we will have to
rely on non-permanent personnel like graduate students and post-docs for
some of these tasks.  Doesn't this become and administrative nightmare
trying to keep every location covered?

3.  If we assume that the main responsibility of the wardens is assisting
the swift and safe evacuation of people from the building, are we to expect
them to do anything after this?  Physically bar people from returning?
Meet at a central location, leaving the exits unmonitored to swap info with
other wardens or emergency personnel?  Is a warden ever given the
responibility to check the enunciator panel before leaving the building to
more quickly offer this info to police and fire departments?

4.  We had hoped to send a basic outline of the requirements for setting up
a warden system to each of the Deans and Chairs in the school.  With these
instructions we had hoped that "they" would select wardens appropriate to
their buildings population, uses and structure.  We would then check what
they had created.  Is this reasonable to expect of them?  Should we rather
be assisting all buildings in the specific assignment of duties and
densities of wardens?

	Perhaps we are being worry-worts, a common habit of nauvice safety
committees, but we would greatly appreciate some direction or feedback.  We
have looked on the web both in Canada and the UK and found warden
descriptions from the point of view of responibilities, but of course
little about how it was set up for specific areas.

	Jeffrey





Dr. Jeffrey Atkinson
Department of Chemistry
Brock University
St.Catharines, Ontario
Canada  L2S 3A1

jatkin@spartan.ac.BrockU.ca
http://chemiris.labs.brocku.ca/~chemweb/faculty/atkinson/
phone:  905 688-5550 ext 3967
fax: 905 682-9020
     905 688-2789


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