Fire Safety for Newly Developed Areas: Caravan Parks

With the close of the holiday season fast approaching, now is the best time to invest in renovations ahead of the next holiday season, particularly at holiday destinations such as caravan parks. But while making any changes to your holiday park, you must not forget to incorporate stringent fire safety compliance in everything you do. Adhering to fire safety legislation is of special importance when it comes to caravans as, on average, there are 360 fires per year in caravans; meanwhile, there are 27,000 fires on heathland, grass and moorland every year, averaging at 73 fires a day.

Consequently, in this month’s article, we’ll be looking at just a few issues of fire safety on newly developed areas to help you ensure that your site doesn’t follow suit with these statistics. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on caravan parks in this article, but the lessons you could learn from our examples could easily be transposed onto a whole host of locations.

Established Fire/Evacuation Points

While planning the renovations for your holiday park, it is important not to forget to allocate space for fire or evacuation points. These refuge areas will be indispensable in the event of a fire, providing staff and holidaymakers with a safe area to go to during a fire. Proper signage is also required to guide people to these locations, as well as to any relevant firefighting equipment such as extinguishers.

Spacing

In order to reduce the risk of fire spreading should one break out, it is essential that you ensure that there is adequate spacing between all aspects of your outdoor area.

For instance, you’ll need to ensure that there are at least 6 metres between caravans and that cars are not parked too closely to the units either. Suitable spacing between units and buildings significantly reduces the likelihood of a fire spreading throughout the holiday park.

Fire Alarms

Even if you have taken vast precautionary measures to prevent a fire, unfortunately you will never be able to rule out the possibility of fire completely. Therefore, you need to ensure that you appropriately install new fire alarms during your renovations to provide an early warning regarding fire. It is essential that the time between the fire starting, the alarm going off and those at risk hearing it is kept to a minimum; acting fast can be the difference between a safe evacuation and a full blown fire, resulting in a more tragic outcome.

Appropriate Equipment

In making changes to your holiday park, you need to ensure that the fire safety equipment you have is still appropriate and well-maintained. The only way of ensuring this beyond a shadow of a doubt is to employ the services of a fire safety professional from a certified body. The qualified person will be able to check that you have the correct fire safety equipment on your premises even after the renovation, as well as that any equipment you have owned for a while is still in full working condition.

Accessible Emergency Telephones

Although many people may now have mobile phones, it pays to be prepared for the time when no one has their phone handy to contact the emergency services. Throughout the park, you should ensure that there are a number of telephones available for both staff and holidaymakers to contact the emergency services should a fire break out.

Overall, there are a plethora of aspects to consider when ensuring that your newly developed premises are meeting fire safety guidelines. Therefore, there is only one way to guarantee that your site is fully compliant with all the latest fire safety legislation: hiring the expertise of a qualified fire safety body, which is exactly where Cheshire Fire can be of help.

Cheshire Fire provide a range of fire safety services including fire alarm installations, fire safety training and free site surveys across the Cheshire area. For a specialised and detailed fire risk assessment of your premises, contact our friendly team today.