Level 4 at two in the morning
You are the lone night guard in the lobby of a ten-storey Wellington office building. At 02:10 the fire alarm panel goes into alarm on level 4, zone 4\u201307, a storeroom off the eastern corridor. There is a faint smell of burning plastic in the lobby, but no visible smoke. The panel shows no other zones in alarm. From the site register you know two contract cleaners signed in at 23:00 and are working on level 7. The building has no night warden; the daytime wardens left at 17:30. The evacuation scheme requires a full evacuation on alarm, the assembly point is across the road at the bus stop, and the main entrance is the designated brigade access point. Your radio does not reach inside the stairwell. It is raining.
1. Set out your actions in priority order and justify why that order and not another.
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The order is chosen by life risk, not by curiosity.
- Call 111 for Fire and Emergency New Zealand first. You do not need to confirm a fire before calling. Give the street address, the entrance the brigade should use, the panel zone, the burning-plastic smell, and that you believe two cleaners are on level 7. A false alarm is FENZ's problem to sort out; a delayed call is yours.
- Take the stairs, never the lift. In a fire the lift is a trap: it can open onto the fire floor, and it can be recalled by the brigade with you inside.
- Get the known life risk out first \u2014 the two cleaners on level 7. Tell them to leave belongings, close doors behind them, use the stairs, and go to the bus stop assembly point. Do a headcount against the register.
- Then check the fire floor from the stairwell, not by walking the corridor. Feel the door with the back of your hand. If it is hot, leave it shut. Stay low; do not go past smoke you cannot see through.
- Attack only what is small, visible and behind you an exit \u2014 a wastebasket-sized fire with a extinguisher, if you are trained. Otherwise close the door, leave, and let FENZ do the job.
- Meet the brigade at the main entrance with the panel printout, keys, a floor plan, and the headcount.
Why not 'check first, then call'? Because the smell in the lobby is already evidence, and every minute of delay adds tenfold to fire growth.
2. The cleaner says, 'Shouldn't you go up and have a look on level 4 before calling?' Give your answer and the reasoning about personal safety and lone working.
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No \u2014 and the reasoning is not cowardice, it is role and physics.
- Role: under the building's evacuation scheme and your site instructions, your job is to raise the alarm, assist evacuation of the parts you can safely reach, and meet the brigade. Internal firefighting and search-and-rescue above the fire floor are firefighter tasks, not guard tasks, and they are not covered by your certificate of approval or your training.
- Physics: smoke is the killer, not flame. Carbon monoxide and hot gas disorient and incapacitate in a handful of breaths. A storeroom fire on level 4 can have a corridor full of smoke before the panel even registers heat.
- Lone working: no backup, no breathing apparatus, no radio coverage inside the stairwell, and no one who knows where you are if you go down. That is exactly the risk profile the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 says must be controlled before the work starts \u2014 not discovered at 02:10.
- What you say to the cleaner: 'The brigade are on their way and I'm not putting either of us in a corridor full of smoke to look at a door. Let's get you out and counted.'
Where the line sits: checking a stairwell door that is cool to the touch, from inside a protected stair, is defensible. Walking an unknown corridor towards a smell of burning is not.
3. Afterwards the building manager asks you to reset the panel, delete the alarm log 'because it's always faulty', and says no report is needed. How do you respond and what do you do?
Read the worked answer
Refuse the deletion, and document the request.
- The alarm log is not yours to delete. It is part of the building's compliance record under its evacuation scheme and building warrant of fitness, potentially evidence in a FENZ investigation, and relevant to the insurer. Destroying it could amount to destroying evidence, and it exposes you and your employer.
- Resetting: only reset when the cause is confirmed and your site instructions (or FENZ) authorise it. Record the time of the reset and who authorised it. Silencing a panel so the building can go back to sleep without anyone attending is how a real fire gets missed.
- The report is written regardless. Same shift: the panel zone and time, the smell, the call to 111 and the reference number, the evacuation of the two cleaners and headcount, the stairwell door check, the brigade arrival and the handover, who reset the panel and when, and the manager's instruction to delete the log.
- Send it up the line to your supervisor and the client, and keep a copy. If the instruction is repeated in writing, escalate to your operations manager \u2014 'the client asked me to delete records' is a protect-yourself moment, not a personality clash.
- Also flag the false-alarm pattern properly: if zone 4\u201307 is repeatedly activating, that is a maintenance issue for the building manager to fix, not a reason to stop recording it.