For those of you who don’t know, the fire service conducted a surprise inspection of the whole of our building today (05/12/2017).
Concerns were expressed about the following:
- The building’s fire alarm - this is currently stuck on “error” and isn’t linked into our unit.
- The construction of the internal walls of the whole unit - the ones that separate the units from each other and the toilet. Although by extension ours will also need attention.
As far as we’re aware, they’ve not chosen to close the entire building (which they would have been legally able to do). Bullet dodged there.
Immediate actions:
- We were informed that we must get smoke alarms TODAY, and were told which ones, how many to get and where they should be. This is being dealt with immediately and at the landlord’s expense.
- The stuff in the corridor needs to be removed as soon as possible, so it’s a good job Cone had booked the skip before all this happened. Everything in the outside corridor is being binned Saturday 09/12/2017 - if you have any stuff there you have days before it gets chucked. As ever if you’re available on Saturday to lend a hand with this please do.
Over the coming weeks and months:
- We will need a proper fire risk assessment, we have been given details of the appropriate person at the fire service to help us with this.
- The walls will need to be fireproofed (this includes our inner walls) - the OSB construction should not be exposed, and will need to be covered in some way. As the “external” (unit) walls are the landlords responsibility, they will be done at their expense. We will keep you up to date with how and when this is going to be done.
- Our unit will be either fitted with a better fire alarm system or integrated into the main fire alarm. This is the landlords responsibility.
All of this has come about due to the new freeholder of the mill caring about the building; as well as the fire inspections they have hired a new building manager who is interviewing for maintenance staff tomorrow, and cleaners have been promised for the communal areas. They are working on getting the lift properly fixed, dealing with the drug users who congregate in the lift bay and generally cleaning up the building.
While this is causing us some inconvenience right now, all of this is generally positive and means we will have a far nicer, safer building in the long term.
Yours,
The Board.