Why you must prevent fire doors from being wedged open

As we’ve stated many times now, fire doors must be viewed as a hugely important part of your fire safety strategy. The importance of ensuring that fire doors remain shut cannot be overlooked. When fire doors are allowed to be correctly and firmly shut they can do their job of preventing the spread of smoke and fire throughout a building.

Having any kind of obstacle in the way of a fire door or even having it wedged and therefore preventing a proper close, will mean that you are putting people in danger. This is something that really shouldn’t and cant be ignored, as you will see clearly labelled on any fire doors, in very visible font - “Fire Door, Keep Shut”, or something along those lines.

In the event of a fire outbreak if it were discovered that any fire door had been wedged open, many insurers would refuse to cover the damages. A fire door will roughly withstand fire for either 30 minutes or even up to 60 minutes, in most cases this would be sufficient time in which to contact emergency services and orchestrate a safe evacuation for all people within a building.

An open fire door is bad in the first place but having your fire door wedged open makes it even more difficult in a rushed situation to free the door and close it properly. If a door isn’t closed properly you can expect a big increase in the speed in which smoke and fire spreads throughout, devastating your building in minutes. Sadly an average of over 60% of premises visited by fire services in the UK were discovered to have had fire doors that were not closed properly. The fact remains that if you are the responsible person in your building and your fire doors are wedged, you are putting lives in danger and therefore breaking the law.

If you absolutely need to have fire doors open, this can be achieved through the use of certain fire safety devices, such as fire door holders or fire door closers. Whether you use a holder or a closer will depend on the environment that the fire door is located in.

For further information regarding fire door safety and our fire door maintenance service, please click here, or give us a call today - 01604 696113.