Restaurants are a great place for patrons to sit back, relax, and have someone else make and serve them a meal for a change. For the employees, however, working in a busy restaurant is anything but relaxing – in fact, it can be chaotic. Servers are running around between the kitchen, bar, and tables trying to take care of the customers, while the kitchen staff is trying to get so many different orders together at once that mistakes are bound to happen, including those that can lead to fires.
Restaurants are full of electrical appliances, grilling equipment, and open flames that could spark a fire at any time, and then if you add in the cooking oils, paper products, and cleaning chemicals that can catch fire all too easily, you have a serious safety risk on your hands. If a fire does break out, it could lead to damaged property, loss of revenue, and even injured staff and customers. That’s why it’s incredibly important for all restaurants to do whatever they can to protect their property, employees, and diners from fires.
Here are 5 fire protection tips to help keep everything and everyone at your restaurant safe and sound.
If you’re really going to make fire safety a priority, then you should do what you can to minimize your risk every single day. Create a fire safety checklist to incorporate into your daily routine, and ensure it includes fire safety practices like the following:
If a fire does break out despite your best efforts, then you need something that will deal with it quickly and effectively. An automatic fire suppression system not only disperses chemicals to help control the fire, but when activated, it will also turn off the electricity or fuel supply to the cooking equipment in the kitchen. This can help prevent a small fire from turning into a big problem.
If your suppression system can’t handle the fire by itself, then you should have portable fire extinguishers around as backups. In the kitchen, you should have Class K fire extinguishers, as they put out fires caused by fats, oils, and grease. The rest of the restaurant should have Class A, B, and C fire extinguishers.
While a suppression system does help deal with fires in the kitchen, you should have something else in place to help protect the rest of the restaurant. Your best option would probably be an automatic sprinkler system, as the other areas of the restaurant shouldn’t require the same kinds of chemicals to put out a fire in the kitchen.
An automatic fire alarm system can save lives by itself by alerting people to the first signs of a fire and allowing them to get out before it gets the chance to spread. It may also help prepare other fire prevention measures such as your suppression system to help control the flames.