The building or project condition
Operating mine site. The buildings stayed in production use throughout, and the work was planned around access windows rather than the other way round.
What FRS delivered
- Replacement of the fire doors across the site
- Supply and installation of the replacement doorsets, including frames and hardware
What made it difficult
- Remote mobilisation, with crew, doorsets and hardware scheduled to arrive together
- Live operating buildings, so openings could not be left unsecured between visits
- Site inductions and permit conditions ahead of every access window
Technical basis
The replacement doorsets were selected against the fire resistance required for each opening and supplied as complete systems with their supporting evidence, rather than as leaves fitted into existing frames.
What was recorded at close-out
- Location-by-location record of each doorset installed
- Manufacturer, type and test report reference against each opening
- Before and after photographs
- Certificate of Compliance
Fire doors on an operating mine site fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the doors. They get held open, driven into, exposed to dust and temperature swings, and modified to suit whatever the building is being used for this year. By the time a whole population needs replacing, the problem is rarely one bad door — it is that the asset has drifted away from its records.
Why it was a replacement programme rather than a repair programme
Where a doorset can still be identified and the damage is local, repair is usually the better answer. Across this site the combination of condition, alteration history and available evidence pointed the other way. Replacement returned each opening to a documented system with a traceable record behind it, which is what makes the next inspection cycle possible at all.
Planning around a working site
Nothing about this work is technically unusual. What makes it a different job from the same scope in a Perth office building is everything around it: the openings are in buildings that keep operating, the crew is on site for a defined window, and there is no second trip to collect a piece of hardware that did not arrive.
The sequence was therefore set before mobilisation — openings surveyed and measured, doorsets and hardware confirmed against each location, and installation grouped so that no opening was left without a door at the end of a shift.
What the client was left with
A record for each opening showing what is now installed, what evidence supports it, who installed it and when — and a Certificate of Compliance covering the work. The point of the record is not the handover meeting. It is that in five years, somebody inspecting these doors can tell what they are looking at.
