Fire Doors

Video 26 of 51
2 min 39 sec
English
English
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A fire door is an essential part of fire safety equipment. Fire doors are designed to hold smoke and fire back for 30 minutes, so if you were trapped in a building, the fire door would control the fire and hopefully keep you safe. Also, fire doors are good because they will prevent the spread of fire, so even if you are all evacuated out of the building, it can contain the fire within one area, so when the fire services get there, they only have got a small fire to deal with rather than an entire building. Fire doors will be wood-in-construction, and others will be metal-in-construction, they will be sealed around the edges to keep the smoke in. The important thing with a fire door, and this often happens in workplaces, is that a fire door can be propped open. Maybe it is too hot in the office, or people go in and out of the door regularly, so they leave the fire door open. They may put a big, heavy water container next to it just to keep the door open, and this means that the fire door is not operational. Particularly if it is a fire door at the top of the stairs or something like that, because then you have got a large obstruction as well as the main fire door being left open.
With fire doors, they need to be able to be checked regularly to make sure they close  properly. So you can push the door, and then you will see the door go out, and then it should close nice and tightly into the frame of the door. Some fire doors have automatic closing devices, so the door is held open by a magnetic, electronic connection. In the event of a fire alarm going off, the doors will automatically close. When the fire alarms are tested, these doors are tested at the same time to make sure that these doors always close.
Now with a fire door, some doors have windows in and some don't have windows in, but if you had to open the door and you are not sure that there is a fire on the other side, then you need to be careful. As you open the door, that is going to introduce oxygen in to make smoke and flames come out very, very fast and very, very hot. So to start with, we want to find out if the door is hot, touch the back of your hand onto the door. It is a good way of finding out if it is hot, and actually onto the metalworks. If you have got a handle on there, if you were to grab hold of the handle, and then pull the handle open, or then push or pull something that is hot, if you are gripping onto something, your hand might get stuck on there and burned. If you are using the back of your hand, your hand may still get burned, but at least your hand can come away as you will not have been actually gripping onto something. So be very, very careful when you are opening a door. If there is a window that you can look through to see what the exit is like on the other side, but just make sure that if there are any problems with the fire doors, if you notice any breakages or it doesn't close properly or automatically, or there is anything wrong with the seal going around the fire doors, report it immediately.