Technical library
Inspection
Baseline surveys, what an inspection records, and how limits are reported.
Inspection articles
How should inaccessible passive fire items be reported?
Record the access limitation and the area it affects, as a finding in its own right. Do not turn "not inspected" into "acceptable" because the asset could not be reached.
Scott CunninghamWhat is a passive fire baseline survey?
A baseline survey creates a usable starting record for an existing building or portfolio: what assets and conditions can be located, what records exist, what can be observed, and what is missing before a maintenance or rectification programme is built on top of it.
Scott CunninghamWhat is the difference between an observation and a compliance conclusion?
An observation is what the inspector can see, measure or confirm from records. A compliance conclusion compares the actual condition against the applicable requirement and the evidence behind it, and may need information a visual inspection cannot supply. Reporting the second as though it were the first is how a register becomes unsafe to rely on.
Scott CunninghamWhat should a passive fire inspection record?
For each item: the asset or location, what was observed, the relevant evidence or the gap in it, and a next action. "Pass" or "fail" without the reason is rarely enough for whoever has to price or rectify it afterwards.
Scott CunninghamWhat should you do before inspecting passive fire in an older building?
Establish the building's era and check the asbestos register before anyone inspects anything. Two separate dates matter here and they are easily confused. In Western Australia a workplace building constructed on or before 31 December 2003 requires an asbestos register — that is the date that triggers the obligation, not the 1980s or 1990s. The exemption runs the other way: a workplace built after that date can go without a register only where no asbestos has been identified and none is likely to be present. Separately, sprayed protection applied to structural steel from roughly the 1930s into the 1970s is friable, so it is treated as the highest priority on site — friable material releases fibres when disturbed rather than only when cut, and era alone makes it suspect rather than proven. The material question comes first; the fire-protection question waits behind it.
Scott Cunningham
Still not sure what you are looking at?
Send the tag, the schedule reference and photographs of the actual condition. We will tell you what they show and what else is needed.