Fire safety should be a concern for each household, for each business, for each property owner and developer.
It doesn’t take much to spark a fire. During an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday, director of the Civil Protection Department (CPD) Peter Paul Coleiro said that the CPD was most concerned with people who had a complete disregard for fire safety, such as filling a room with a lot of combustibles and flammable materials. Besides this, the CPD receives a lot of calls for fires which are related to misuse of appliances or faulty appliances.
One cannot stress enough just how important it is to ensure that appliances are used properly and that people take care to implement fire safety measures. A fire alarm system, a fire sprinkler system, a fire extinguisher could mean the difference between putting out a small fire before it really spreads, to being in life-threatening danger and massive amounts of fire damage.
But the CPD Director said that this isn’t enough. He was adamant that having a good fire safety system is not only about having a good alarm, but it is about having a good protocol in place where everyone knows what to do and what their role is when a fire breaks out. “You have to have a system and you have to manage it perfectly.”
When mentioning fire safety measures, he spoke about the CPD’s plans to implement new fire safety regulations to strengthen this sector and develop a new culture where fire safety is already accounted for in the planning stages of a project and not simply something which is treated as an afterthought. “The situation is not that bad... but currently, there are no fire safety regulations in place, only small bits.”
One cannot stress just how important it is for this issue to be tackled, and it is surprising, and most worrying, that in 2023 the country is without such regulations.
The director said that the CPD’s intention is to cover all bases with these regulations and implement them once everything has been addressed. One hopes that this will not take much longer.
To implement new measures a number of different factors need to be taken into consideration, he said, such as the law, the resources the CPD has, the owner who must have the will to implement fire safety measures, the professional who will give the required solutions and those installing the measures who must be as professional as those giving the solution. We cannot take fire safety for granted, and it is not just up to the CPD to ensure people’s safety from fires.
Malta is densely populated, with many apartment blocks standing side by side. Fire safety is not just about protecting yourself and your property, but also about protecting those around you.
We must have the necessary regulations, protocols and safeguards in place to ensure that strict fire safety measures are enforced.
When discussing the threat of high-rises, Coleiro said that as long as all the buildings have the proper fire safety systems in place and they are well maintained, there should not be a problem. There are standards that these buildings need to follow and for the most part, he said that these are followed.
One hopes that with the sheer amount of development that has been occurring around the island, and here we are not just talking about high-rises, that fire safety has been a priority for those undertaking such projects.