‘Life risk’ has two significant elements. The first is that posed to our communities in the event of a fire or another emergency incident such as a flooding or a collapsed building. All emergency incidents that West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) respond to are categorised into 5 risk categories. These are:
High Risk - Composed of those incidents that present the most significant risk to life for example Dwelling Fires and Road Traffic Collissions.
Medium Risk - Composed of those incidents where there is a potential life risk (either through incident severity or the type of property affected), but there is a reduced likelihood of this risk being realised for example vehicle fires and floodings.
Low Risk - Composed up of those incidents where there is a significantly reduced risk to life.
Secondary Fires That Attract a 20 minute Response Time - Incidents within this category are low risk secondary fires for example a grass fire or fires involving road furniture.
Risk is constantly monitored and analysed in order to analyse current and predict future trends. Analysis is carried out in a number of ways including Temporal analysis, Resource allocation tools and Equipment Monitoring
Predicting future trends enables West Midlands Fire Service to be proactive in carrying out targeted prevention work in key areas that helps to reduce risk and make the West Midlands safer as a whole. A good example of such prevention work are Home Safety Checks that are targeted at groups within the local community that are more vulnerable to fire. Most deaths and injuries from fire happen in the home, so our primary target for managing life risk, is to help people to look after their own safety and when all else fails, to receive an early warning from a smoke alarm so that they have the best possible chance of escaping (by following a pre-planned escape plan). To find out more about how we address risk in the community, please click here
We also target life risk through our system of fire safety inspection and enforcement. We have teams of specialist fire safety officers who audit the standard of safety management across all types of workplace, including licensed premises and places where numbers of people congregate for leisure activities and may be at risk in the event of fire.
We maintain a list of all these places and apply a weighting system (Risk Based Inspection Programme), to ensure that the higher risk sites are targeted for attention. We can give advice and guidance to the managers of industrial and commercial premises, but for those who fail to comply with the required standards, we have to apply the ultimate sanction of prosecution.
The second element is the life risk posed to our firefighters. More information on firefighter risk can be found at ‘What do we mean by Firefighter Risk?’
