FIA

Yacht business makes inroads into false alarms

The FIA has been working closely with the Chief Fire Officers' Association (CFOA), the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) and the Telecare Services Association for some time to reduce the number of false alarms from automatic fire detection systems and has had a significant number of successes.

In addition to this top down approach that the FIA has adopted with CFOA, FIA has also pushed a 'bottoms up' approach of working with individual companies/organisations that have problems with false alarms.

One such company is Princess Yachts, a Plymouth based business which has four sites employed in the manufacture of hand-built motor yachts.  Fire protection is essential given the prevalence of combustible materials and potential ignition sources.  There is a clear need to ensure the safety of personnel and to guard against the loss of high value assets within buildings as well as the infrastructure itself.  The premises are protected from fire by a host of addressable and non-addressable fire detection and alarm systems receiving signals from a variety of point smoke, heat and linear beam detectors.

The production line process for some 30 yachts a month involves a range of industrial processes which can give rise to unwanted fire alarms through the initially localised presence of heat, smoke and other particulates.  This represents an especially difficult situation for the reliable and specific detction of incipient fire events given the area being protected and the wide variety of processes undertaken on the yachts as they pass through the line.  It is no surprise, therefore, that unwanted fire alarm signals have been a feature of the Princess Yachts facilities over an extended period.

FIA member company, Trinity Protection Systems Ltd is the fire systems provider for Princess Yachts and its Exeter office has been working closely with Nigel Smith, Facilities Manager at Princess, to put in place measures to address the false alarms issue.

New procedures adopted thus far include robust reporting on the sources of false alarms, the introduction of a switchable day/night mode and the implementing of a double-knock function in a specific area.  This has already significantly reduced the costs of false alarms incurred through business disruption and associated lost revenue, in addition to saving fire service resources involved in spurious call-outs.  Comparing call-out costs over the first half of 2007 with the equivalent period this year, a figure of some £20,000 in 2007 has been drastically reduced to only 12,000 in the first six months of 2008.  Given that this represents an on-going process with further measures to be implemented, the FIA looks forward to learning of even better progress as the year unfolds.