EMCOR – Fire Damper Inspections and Remedials

Introduction

EMCOR UK is a leading high performance, sustainable integrated facility and workplace management company.

Hydro-X Fire were approached by EMCOR UK as they were looking for a company that could inspect their fire dampers as part of their contract with Royal Sun Alliance sites. These sites covered Horsham, Chelmsford, Manchester, and Halifax so would require coordination across all sites to ensure the project ran smoothly.

Following thorough inspections across all of these sites by our trained engineers, the required remedials were identified and presented back to EMCOR

Challenge

Due to there being multiple sites and the age of the building, the first major problem that we faced was the fact that this remedial project needed a greater level of funding and understanding as there were more fire dampers than initially estimated. They also had not been inspected previously, which meant there were more issues identified as dampers had failed over time.

The second challenge was to agree a program of works that EMCOR would be happy with and could also help bring the building within the BS:9999 regulations. Throughout this project there were several strict covid regulations in place which we had to adhere to. Fortunately for this project, most of the staff within these buildings were able to work from home. This meant that our engineers had more freedom around the sites than we had initially anticipated, and we didn’t need to alter their schedules around the working day as much to minimize any disruption to the sites.

Solution

To help improve the level of understanding about the fire safety regulations, EMCOR account managers, and a number of employees from Royal Sun Alliance visited our sister company, Hydro-X Training, and attended the City & Guilds accredited Fire Damper Testing Course. As well as this enhancing their understanding of this particular area, these employees were also able to gain a better grasp on how important these remedial works were in keeping everyone within these buildings safe in the event of a fire

While we were on site conducting the agreed works, we used our multisite live fire damper tracking system. This helped us to create an accurate asset list for each site and was of benefit to help us track the various remedials and what stage these were at across all of the relevant sites. The remedial works spanned a number of months, and it was planned in a way that the same engineers completed the work to create continuity.

In order to keep EMCOR up to date with each stage of this long process, the Technical Compliance Manager for EMCOR, Steven Scott, attended weekly QP20 meetings with our account manager to discuss the progress that was being made, any potential obstacles that could be an issue to this progress and to the safety of our engineers, as well as agreeing steps for the next 1-2 weeks to maintain the positive momentum of this project.

Value added

Hydro-X Fire were able to be of assistance to EMCOR as we were able to complete this fire damper testing across a number of sites in addition to delivering the required remedials to bring the buildings into compliance with the fire safety regulations. This saved EMCOR engaging multiple contractors for each site as Hydro-X Fire were able to complete all of these works in house, saving EMCOR a significant amount of time and money.