By Denise Pappas, Executive Director
October is National Fire Prevention month and when I think about fire prevention, I think about reducing the chance of fire by increasing what you know. If you are a fire and life safety stakeholder in a large, multi-building facility or campus, your job is to reach the highest possible level of fire and life safety every day. To achieve this goal, you need to take a holistic approach to the fire and life safety equipment that provides fire alarm information to you, your dispatchers, and the responding fire department. In our industry, we call that overall situational awareness. Within a large multi-building facility, there are complexities that affect the whole facility in ways far greater than those of a single building.
Situational awareness provides an overall picture of all facility fire alarm activity and enables fire and life safety stakeholders to made optimal decisions for the well-being of their campus or facility. A major requirement in achieving overall situational awareness is communication and information exchange. For example, many facilities have multiple brands and models of your fire alarm control panels that cannot provide their information in a single, facility-wide system? A system that aggregates all the information into a single system can provide overall situational awareness instead of communicating data from a single building.
A high level of situational awareness helps system administrators and other fire and life safety stakeholders to recognize the scope of an event, to pinpoint exactly where it is occurring, assess the likelihood of it spreading, and where it is likely to spread. A single system can also identify faulty equipment before it breaks down and enable a proactive response before there is a fire.
Systems like Keltron aggregate fire alarm control panels into a single system to provide optimal situational awareness to prevent fires. Let’s discuss…
