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Fire Safety in High-rise buildings.
If you are responsible for Fire safety or are a resident of a high-rise, multi-occupancy property you will be only too aware of the increased awareness of the need for enhanced fire detection and evacuation processes.
The former ‘stay put’ guidance is now regarded as unsafe and has been replaced by a ‘simultaneous evacuation’ strategy.
Many properties have deployed a waking watch service; this is a fire protection service and involves marshals patrolling to lookout for potential signs of a fire. They are also responsible for raising the alarm.
These services are costing property owners and residents thousands of pounds. A Waking Watch service can be replaced by a wireless Fire Detection System. This meets all the required standards and is quickly and easily installed. The total one-off cost of a Fire Detection System can be less than 10 weeks of a Waking Watch service.
The practice of recording CCTV images in digital format is now widely accepted and there are many manufacturers and resellers of what is generically known as the DVR (Digital Video Recorder).
A DVR stores all the images onto internal Hard Drives and presents views of all cameras on a display. All recorded footage can be viewed simultaneously across all the cameras on the system. A user can go back to any time in the recording and playback a recording in a matter of seconds. The recorded images can be stored to hard drives or CDs and archived for as long as necessary.
With the migration to IP based CCTV surveillance camera signals are sent in a digital format, via a network connection. A Network Video Recorder (NVR) will only accept network-connected cameras.
As with all technology, there is a wide range of products available and it is important to use equipment that will meet the performance required.
The key features to consider are the following:
Higher resolution recording to give better playback quality
Higher capacity to allow many sources to be recorded for long periods at high frame rates and at a higher quality
A means to analyse, copy and transmit bulk footage in the event of a major incident
Analytic or advanced search facilities, allowing days weeks or months of video recording to be filtered down to the required events very quickly
