The forthcoming Regulatory Reform Order or RRO will remove or change more than 120 pieces of fire legislation. Fire and rescue services will no longer define the necessary fire precautions. Instead, the onus will be on an employer or a building's owner to identify risks for themselves and then show how they have addressed the risks they have identified.
With those new responsibilities in mind, and with a wish to upgrade its alarm system, British Sugar asked Rolton Fire to carry out a comprehensive assessment of all of its fire precautions and the risks involved at its factory in Bury St Edmunds.
The factory is a busy and complex site that posed some interesting challenges, because of the variety of work that goes on there. The site processes and stores roughly 12,000 tonnes of sugar beet every day for about five months of the year.
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The juice processed during the growing season is stored in silos on site and the by-products that aren't fit for human consumption are made into high-energy animal feed. The factory is powered by its own gas turbine power station with any energy that surplus to requirements being sold back into the National Grid.
The Fire Team looked carefully at all the processes on the site and the materials used. Their audit divided the site into 40 separate units and examined the implications in each for legislation, life risk, ignition and fire load, prevention, means of warning and escape, internal and external fire spread and extinguishment and the Fire & Rescue Service.
The report that Rolton Fire produced gives British Sugar the opportunity to develop an accurate specification for a fire alarm system, which means that the company can target its spending accurately at the most relevant risks.
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