Fire safety over Christmas: cold weather, decorations and a thinner rota

Most buildings do not change much between January and October. Then, over about six weeks, three things happen at once: portable heating appears, the building fills with decorations and deliveries, and the people who know how it works go on leave. None of those is a fire safety failure on its own. Together they are the reason the weeks either side of Christmas produce findings that would not have been there in June.

Your fire risk assessment describes a building. Winter quietly changes the building it describes, which is why review is triggered by change as well as by the calendar — a point worth reading alongside how review dates actually work.

Portable heating is the big one

When a building gets cold, heaters appear. They are bought locally, plugged into whatever socket is free, and placed where somebody is sitting — which is usually near soft furnishings, under a desk, or against a wall with cabling behind it. Nobody records them, so they are not in any assessment, and the circuits they are on were loaded for an office rather than for a dozen heating elements.

The controls here are mundane and they work: know what has arrived, decide what is permitted, and say so before December rather than after an incident. If heaters are allowed, that is a decision with conditions attached — where they may go, what they may not be placed near, and that they go off when the last person leaves.

Decorations, deliveries and the escape route

Escape routes do not fail by design. They fail by accumulation, and December is the month with the most to accumulate: stock for a seasonal peak, parcels nobody has put away, a tree in a lobby, and a fire door wedged because people are carrying boxes through it. Every one of those is reversible in a minute and invisible by the following week.

This is the period to walk the routes more often rather than less, with the escape route inspection checklist if you want a structure for it. The thing to look at hardest is the final exit: not whether it is unlocked, but whether it actually opens, because a door with a pallet behind it reads as perfectly secure from the inside.

What the cold does to the systems themselves

Cold weather is not neutral for fire safety equipment. Water-filled systems in unheated spaces are the obvious case — a sprinkler system relies on frost protection, trace heating and a valve nobody has closed, and all three are worth confirming before a long shutdown rather than discovering in January. Dry risers in external cabinets take a battering from weather and vandalism in equal measure over winter.

Emergency lighting matters more in December than it does in June for a simpler reason: it gets dark at four, so the periods when a building is occupied and unlit overlap far more. If the only test anybody has ever run is the short function check, the building has never established that the lighting lasts as long as the design assumes.

The rota is the part people forget

A building's fire safety arrangements are built around the people in it. Over Christmas the building keeps running — sometimes with skeleton staff, sometimes with agency cover, often with contractors in while the place is quiet — and the arrangements that assumed a full team quietly stop being true.

• –Who is the fire warden on 27 December, and on the days nobody has looked at yet?
• –Does anybody with a personal emergency evacuation plan work through the period, and is the person who assists them also on leave?
• –Are agency or temporary staff getting the same induction as anybody else, including what the alarm sounds like here?
• –Who holds the keys, the alarm codes and the out-of-hours number — and is that person reachable?
• –If a contractor needs hot work done while the building is empty, who issues the permit and who closes it?

That last one is worth dwelling on. Quiet buildings are when disruptive work gets scheduled, and hot work starts fires after the work has stopped. A hot work permit is not paperwork for its own sake: it is the record that somebody went back and checked the area once everybody had gone home, which is exactly the check nobody makes on 23 December.

Arson risk goes up when the building goes quiet

Deliberate ignition is a significant share of fires in some premises types, and the conditions that invite it are all seasonal: more waste outside, bins moved to wherever there is room, early darkness, and a building that is visibly empty for days at a time. The controls for arson risk are unglamorous — bin location, waste not accumulating against walls, external lighting working, and the perimeter secured — and they are the ones most likely to slip precisely when they matter most.

A short before-the-break list

None of this needs a new system. It needs somebody to walk the building with December in mind rather than June, and to write down what they find. If you want the walk to produce something you can act on, the fire safety audit checklist covers the records, and the fire log book is where the result belongs.