It takes longer to make a cup of tea than to evacuate a fire

In order for a fire evacuation to be safe, everyone should ideally be out within 2 minutes of the alarm ringing or the fire starting. This short span of time is crucial – and can be all that stands between life and death. And yet, in fire drills up and down the country, businesses struggle to get their staff up and out.

To help workers understand just how little time there is to safely evacuate their building, we compared a safe fire evacuation time with the time it takes the average Brit to make a cup of tea — milk and sugar included!

Making a cup of tea takes, on average, 4-6 minutes — twice the amount of time it would take to safely evacuate a building. To boil 1 litre of water takes roughly 2-3 minutes and, when you factor in brewing or ‘steeping time’ (at 2-3 minutes again), we can safely say that the perfect brew for our nation of tea-lovers takes around 5 minutes on average.

But what about other workplace activities?

To further illustrate our point, we looked at the global and national averages for other common workplace activities, finding that, in the time it takes to safely evacuate a building, you can carry out any one of the following workplace tasks:

– Read through 9 emails

– Power up your laptop 4 times

– Print a 40 page document

– Let 8 phone calls ring until voicemail

– Download approximately 40 word documents*

*Assuming an average document size of 26kb and a minimum download speed of 25Mbps.

See? The time needed to get out of a burning building safely is deceptively quick, but can make all the difference.

Fire evacuations

Organisations should be carrying out at least one fire drill per year and recording the results. They should also keep the results as part of a fire safety and evacuation plan, and be trying to improve their evacuation speeds year on year to guarantee the safety of their employees.

Looking to improve the fire safety of your building or organisation? Fire Seals Direct offer a comprehensive range of passive fire protection products — from fire seals to fire door closers – which can help delay the spread of fire.

For more information visit www.firesealsdirect.co.uk, email sales@firesealsdirect.co.uk or call 029 2085 7959.

-ends-