The Fire and Life Safety Blog

I started writing this blog post after a discussion with a CEO of an Aged Care facility who said I was the first person (they could remember) who said that they didn’t have the necessary information to maintain their Essential Safety Measures (ESM), let alone sign an Annual Essential Safety Measure report.

I suspect that the CEO was initially skeptical and thought I was possibly angling for consulting work, but when the CEO realised that they didn’t have the full story and had not been told by others, I started to fear more for the safety of their maintenance providers.

We are actually talking about the sort of information you need to operate a building successfully, but let’s narrow it down again before this post gets too big. We can usefully sort the nature of the information into some categories. These are:

1. What ESM are in the building;
2. What installation standard were the ESM installed to;
3. What standard of maintenance and frequency of maintenance should be undertaken to keep the ESM operating at the installation standard;

Let’s have a look in more detail at the sort of information we are looking for (more…)

In Victoria (Australia) there are three key places you can go looking for information about the Essential Safety Measures (ESM) in your building.  Any body can do it, provided you have the owner’s consent to act as their agent for the search. These are the three places you look:

1. The Council;
2. The Fire Services (Country Fire Authority and Melbourne Fire and Emergency Services Board); and
3. The Building Appeals Board.

The Council is your key resource. They hold all the archives of building approval records on the buildings in their municipality and get forwarded (in theory) records of all the works approved by private building surveyors since the 1 July 1994. The Fire Services have copies of all the old fire protection reports that may have been issued for buildings where there was a variation requested from the installation standard for the fire services during the approval process for building works. The Building Appeals Board (BAB) holds BAB (and former Building Referees Board) modification determinations since the middle of the 1900’s. These determinations may have modified the installation standard of any ESM in the building.

Now that you know where to look the next issue is what are you actually looking for?