Fire safety management for small and medium enterprise offices in old industrial buildings

With the change of the economic structure, most of the old industrial buildings built before 1972 in Hong Kong are now used as offices or non-industrial workplaces. Those old building might not have adequate fire safety provisions and it is difficult to upgrade these hardware provisions too. The occupational safety and health problems on fire safety are even more serious if the offices are use for small and medium enterprises which have special characteristics of small areas packed with large quantity of combustibles and high occupant loading. There is limited investment on safety in those offices. This paper aims to solve the aforementioned problems by applying a total fire safety concept to the old industrial buildings. To provide adequate fire safety, software fire safety management schemes should be worked out carefully. Actions to be taken in the management schemes are recommended to control and integrate hardware passive building construction, active fire services installations and control of risk factors. How a fire safety plan can be prepared by recommending a maintenance plan, a staff training plan, a fire prevention plan; and a fire action plan to outline the procedures clearly with normal mode is illustrated in the paper.