I recently ran a poll on LinkedIn to determine what percentage of facility managers perform the task of fire and smoke damper inspections in-house. I wasn’t surprised when approximately 72% of those polled chose to contract damper inspections out to specialists like us. Performing a passive fire protection inspection is a daunting task and not many facilities have the internal resources to complete the inspections themselves.
This poll, of course, has me thinking about what the rest of the facilities do when it comes to damper inspections. We all know that health care facilities enforce the inspection of dampers because of the Joint Commission requirement, but what about other facilities such as industrial plants, manufacturing plants, office buildings and college campuses? We recently attended the Campus Fire Safety conference in Columbus, Ohio and had the opportunity to speak with different Facility Engineers and Maintenance Managers about NFPA and the codes that require passive fire protection inspections.
While we certainly understand how hard it must be for these facility managers to maintain a college campus and we are constantly in awe in the amount of knowledge that is needed to perform their job efficiently, I think what we were most surprised about was the fact that most of the facility managers at this show didn’t even know the code existed – and they were very, very concerned. In our experience, individuals in the facility management profession take their jobs very seriously.
With this in mind, LSS Life Safety Services has made it our number 1 initiative this year to help educate facility managers about the NFPA codes that require fire and smoke damper inspections, fire door inspections, firestopping and commissioning. We have found that when armed with the knowledge that all dampers need to be inspected as mandated by the NFPA, these individuals tend to move quickly towards compliance. After all, they know the importance of fire safety and that building compliance is part of their job.
