Human resource capacity development for fire safety in industrial buildings

Abstract

The buildings and the built environment in general play a key role in supporting business activities and delivering economic prosperity for the corporation and society in general. Buildings are designed to provide the essential elements of an enclosed workspace, which affords physical security and a barrier to the elements. There are increasing occasions when these simple functions are rattled or distorted by disasters. However, catastrophic disasters such as fire disasters have made organisations to devote greater attention to emergency preparedness in order to protect employees, customers, properties and business continuity. Achieving this goal requires that management and information systems are available to facilitate the recover}' of core business operations. While safeguarding systems and arranging for substitutes is vital, it is equally important to ensure the availability of proper human capacity to operate these systems and behave under adverse emergency conditions. This paper therefore aimed to study impact of human characteristics on fire accidents and develop a conceptual model for strengthening the human capacity to respond fire disaster in industrial buildings. A comprehensive literature review was used as research methodology for this research paper. Key words such as fire disaster, human characteristics, emergency management programme and industrial buildings were used to search the literature. Literature findings revealed that probability of fire occurrences in factory buildings is higher than other industrial building categories. Many factories do not arrange regular drill, awareness programme etc.; therefore, the workers discover themselves in an alien situation whenever an emergency situation arises, causing panic, stampede etc. which further escalate the degree of casualty. Also, the cause analysis for most of the fire accidents in industrial buildings shows that many accidents have occurred due to technical and human failures where human failures include lack of awareness of the safety precautions required, inadequate expert knowledge and qualifications in accident prevention, poor guidance and behaviour of the personnel in the building either before or during the incident. Based on the literature findings, a conceptual model is developed and the finding of this research will be a guideline to propose a better working condition so that the strong fire safety environment can be created. Keywords: Fire Disaster, Human Characteristics, Emergency Management