The Fire Log Book

In order to comply with the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order 2005, records need to be kept on recording and testing of fire safety features and equipment. Fire log books are a good way of complying with these regulations and managing your fire safety within your business. The log book can be in different forms, either in digital or paper, and there are no set rules on how you record the information, but you would need to look at your risk assessments to identify the best way for your business.
Log books can be commercial books or log books that you get off of the internet, or you can create one yourself. One good way of having the log books displayed is in pouches that fix to the wall in a prominent place so they can be updated and inspected easily. What we are going to do now is have a look at a fire safety log book. Now this one we use here is the one we use in our training at our offices. Now, on the front cover, it will say where the actual log book is, and the address that it applies to. Inside you have got details of "in case of emergency". So, from a very quick point you can pick the book up and get the fire brigade numbers, you can get the numbers for door maintenance, emergency lighting, fire safety officers or the alarm system manufacturer. After that you have got the section where it lists the fire safety staff. So here, you can list your Fire Wardens, your Fire Marshalls and also any visits you have had from the fire brigade. After that it has got the fire drills. Now, fire drills are really important. When you have a fire drill, you then need to log it. So if you do a full evacuation, you can actually log the evacuation so it does show that you are doing regular fire drills to evacuate people from the building.
This book here has also got some other areas where it has got some fire tips, so it has got information about activating alarms and about signs. The rest of the log book carries on. There is a section for monitoring the fire alarm and detection system and also any particular fire doors, so here you can look at when the testing has happened, and were there any problems, and then they get signed off. We then look at emergency lighting, we know that emergency lighting is very important. We need to ensure that at all times the lighting is correctly working, so at regular intervals based on your risk assessment, you will check to make sure that the lighting works when the power goes out. We them look at the fire extinguishers and the hose reels, so then here we are just checking to make sure that regular fire checks are being carried out on any fire reels or any fire extinguishers that are held on the premises.
The next section is staff training. Now training is really, really important and this is where in the book you can log general staff training. It may well be that this training is done as a part of an evacuation, so for example we did this test on here. We had a full evacuation of the building, and as a part of that, we then did initial training to start with, a full evacuation, and then a debrief and then that formed a part of the training. All that would then get logged in the book, so you have then got a good log of any training that has actually happened.
Now as we said earlier on, with these books, you can use a commercial book like this, you can make your own one up, or you can download them off the internet, but it is important that you have records of all information to do with fire safety kept somewhere centrally within the business.