Global safety, health and environmental management services provider Nosa maintains that it is imperative that businesses in fire-related industries, such as smelting and minerals processing, assume a self-regulatory role with regard to fire safety standards.

Nosa marketing, social media and commer-cial editor Nadia Pisanti says the policing of occupational safety in environments where high-temperature equipment is used is extremely difficult, owing to the scope of responsibilities placed on fire departments and the Department of Labour’s inspectors.

As such, Nosa encourages companies to take responsibility for their own fire safety by undertaking a risk assessment, which identifies all possible hazards in their opera-tions, and consulting with technical experts to formulate and implement control measures under the guidance of Nosa. Taking the client’s specific risk profile and working environment into account, Nosa can provide training and tailored advice that are suited to the client’s operations and are in line with the Occupational Health and Safety Act or the Mine Health and Safety Act.

urrent fire safety and smelting clients include steel and vanadium slag pro-ducer Evraz Highveld Steel & Vanadium, and the company continues to provide training and assistance at ferrochrome producer Samancor’s Tubatse plant in Steelpoort, Limpopo, which has 16 charge chrome furnaces in operation.

Nosa has developed several fire-safety consultancy services to assist businesses operating in fire-related industries to formulate and enforce safety measures. This includes helping businesses cultivate emergency plans, conducting fire risk assessments and developing emergency procedure manuals and evacuation plans.

Nosa also offers advice on systems integra-tion, which involves the combination of numerous technical infrastructure systems such as electric, heating, ventilation, climate control, lighting, access control, video surveillance, alarm systems, fire detection, automatic fire suppression and evacuation. Nosa can further provide access control data that supports safe evacuation during emergency situations, video analytics that allows for defining an object in a video surveillance sequence, corporate security solutions and intelligent response systems that can assist in preparing for and managing emergency evacuations.

In conjunction with these services, Nosa runs various fire-safety training courses, including basic fire awareness, evacuation awareness, emergency evacuation proce-dures, basic and advanced firefighting, as well as fire marshal and first aid training.