In a recent interview, I was asked to describe some interesting and humorous incidents I had experienced with fire safety in hotels. I will share a few incidents here with eHotelier readers.
Fire alarm kills the romance
This first incident always makes me smile when I tell it. It happened in Scotland. A 5-star hotel had to be evacuated one afternoon because smoke was wafting out of a shaft. The spa and pool areas were cleared and guests had to stand outside on the street in the freezing cold wearing bathrobes and slippers.
When the evacuation team started to clear the rest of the building, I received a phone call from one of the rooms. A man was very upset about a noise right outside his bedroom. He did not know what it was. It was, in fact, the fire alarm bell. I said to him, ‘please leave the hotel immediately’, but he did not want to because he was with his girl friend. I insisted, and he and his girl friend left reluctantly.
Later he lodged an official complaint claiming the fire alarm interfered with his romantic liaison with his girl friend that afternoon. He asked for his money back. However, we refused his claim because the old motto holds true: Safety before pleasure! Although there is a funny side to this incident, the man attitude towards the fire alarm and his resistance to evacuating the hotel was no laughing matter.
Smoke coming from the bedroom
Some cultures love cooking their own food in the hotel room. Once in a 4-star hotel a fire alarm went off in a guest bedroom during a busy shift. The guests were cooking Chicken Tandoori with a camping cooker instead of ordering room service. It set off a pre-alarm. Airing out the room took a long time, as you can imagine.
Another group of guests had a party in a hotel suite. It was a quiet party all night long and they enjoyed themselves with food and beverages from room service. They then decided to smoke a Shisha. They had a lot of Shisha’s that night. They covered the smoke detector with a plastic bag to stop it going off.
At 4:30 am, the draft of the air conditioning sucked the smoke outside the room and into the corridor. A massive amount of smoke was coming out of the suite and it set off the smoke detectors in the corridor. It was difficult to determine where the smoke was coming from and we were not sure what exactly was burning. Burning wood and the plant we later found out they were smoking smelled very similar. The smoke could have come from any of the rooms or out of the ventilation shafts. We decided to call the fire service to check it out and to make sure there was no smouldering fire between the ceilings.
The fire department was not able to find the source either. Because the smoke was quite thick, we had no choice but to wake up guests and evacuate that part of the building. Later we found out that the smoke was coming from the party suite where they were smoking opium.
The guests in the suite received a bill for all costs of the incident. Unsurprisingly, they paid in full without any objections.
Sauna on fire
Another time there was a fire in a sauna oven. This story is a simultaneous good and bad example of poor maintenance management and failure to follow proper procedures that needlessly put a life at risk.
The electric oven in the spa of a luxury hotel caught fire. A staff member grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher and quickly took aim at the centre of the flames as the hotel had trained him. He was electrocuted. He had inadvertently used a water extinguisher. The oven was 220v and the electricity was still turned on. The employee failed to take the first step and switch the power to the oven off. Eventually the oven blew a fuse. The employee was rushed to hospital suffering major injuries.
A guest of the hotel finally extinguished the fire using a powder extinguisher he found in another room. It was discovered later that the extinguisher the employee used was not meant to be in the spa area and no one realised it.
My advice to every hotel is to double check all fire extinguishers in all areas as an added step outside of the regular inspection by the service provider. This is what you should look out for:
1. Make sure you have the right type of extinguisher for each area
2. Check that seals are not broken
3. Check expiration date is still valid
4. It has happened that after a provider inspected the extinguishers, they were returned to the wrong positions. Double check.
I highly recommend comparing emergency floor plans with the actual location of the fire extinguishers in the entire building. Sometimes, extinguishers are not marked on the drawing. I often find discrepancies between the drawings and the actual positioning of the fire extinguishers. Other times the extinguishers are missing.
A full risk assessment can help evaluate the fire safety standard in the hotel.
Founder and Managing Director of Sky Touch Consulting, Stefan Vito Hiller, has over 20 years experience in the hotel industry including five years experience in the security field. He has worked for leading hotel brands in Munich, Frankfurt, Bremen, Berlin, Cork, Edinburgh and Doha in the Middle East.When working for a leading global security company in Germany, Stefan developed their hotel and tourism security segment. In this position, he conducted overt and covert security audits, provided security training and developed innovative security solutions.Stefan now consults to hotels to implement innovative and affordable strategies to raise their level of security to meet growing global demands.
