Fire Protection and Loss Control
Uncontrolled fire can threaten all aspects of a business, putting workers, visitors and the surrounding public at risk. Fire can also challenge a business’ survival, continuity and reputation. Industrial fires have resulted in the loss of life and destruction of property. A serious fire can also create long-lasting liability and legal issues and result in a permanently damaged corporate reputation and loss of the public trust.
Even small fires in highly susceptible industries such as food processing, pharmaceuticals, or semiconductor fabrication can result in extensive loss of finished product or production capability due to smoke and water contamination. When a customer goes elsewhere for its upstream supplies because the “go-to” supplier has shut down due to a fire, those customers often never return to the original supplier. In the five-year period from 2014 to 2018, the NFPA reported over 26,000 fires occurred in the manufacturing and process sectors in the US. These resulted in at least 15 deaths, 835 injuries, and direct property losses of $2.5 billion.
Fire Protection represents the multidisciplined effort to control the dangers of fire, including prevention of fires and controlling and mitigating their impact when prevention fails. At DEKRA, we assist our clients in pursuing effective corporate governance through engineering efforts to improve fire prevention, fire suppression, fire containment, and emergency response planning. DEKRA can focus on solving specific fire protection problems in a pragmatic way or develop broad-brush holistic approaches to your fire protection and safety needs.
At DEKRA, our team of Fire Protection Specialists can:
- Identify fire hazards in your process, production equipment, building and storage areas
- Develop/evaluate fire detection and alarm strategies, passive and active fire protection, and emergency response planning
- Evaluate material properties, their impact on fire safety, and potential ignition sources
- Assist in establishing a Basis of Safety for material handling
- Evaluate fire protection system designs, fire protection water reliability and capacity\duration
- Assist with legal compliance (International Fire and Building Codes, OSHA, MSHA)
- Lead investigation into cause and origin of fire incidents
- Consult on best practices (e.g. NFPA Standards, FM Global Datasheets, insurance recommendations)
- Conduct Fire & Spill Control Testing on newly developed chemistry and production equipment
- Develop risk-based solutions for unique fire protection problems
DEKRA’s fire protection and loss control services can seamlessly integrate with our other services including Process Safety Management, Laboratory Services, Explosible Dust Hazards Analysis, and Incident/Forensic Investigation capabilities.
