Citation

Marchant EW, Henesy CJ. Fire Safety J. 1980; 2(2): 111-118.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1980, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Case studies have been made of four industrial fires that have occurred in the South of Scotland area, with the particular objective of identifying the losses that occurred due to interruption of production and other consequences that followed the fire. The businesses in which the firms were engaged were engineering sub-contracting, plastics moulding, joinery and electrical engineering. The problems in the individual firms in returning to a pre-fire status were identified. In none of the firms had there been any contingency planning for fire. A number of factors which caused diffifulties in recovery emerged, for example, the effect on morale of working in smoke damaged and dismal post-fire surroundings, the inconvenience to customers followed by loss of business, the replacement of essential services and raw material stocks, the excessive maintenance of machinery damage by rust, etc. However, no uniform picture of the extent or importance of consequential losses became apparent. There was evidence that firms organised on an efficient production engineering basis might suffer more fire than firms with more slack in space or production line availability. This implies that contingency planning against business or interruption losses following a fire should become a necessary part of production engineering since efficient schedules under normal conditions might be much upset by fire.