Voice sounders from Vimpex Limited have been used to solve a voice evacuation project at St James Wholesale Market in the heart of Bradford.
Multi-message voice sounders were identified as safety enhancements in the event of an incident at the market. However, concerns were raised on the question of how to clearly and unambiguously communicate evacuation or emergency messages to those workers whose first language is not English.
The market is housed in a large warehouse-type building which is open on two sides. Therefore sounders loud enough to be heard over the hubbub of negotiating traders and delivery vehicles was also of importance.
Local fire systems company, Rosse Systems, with the help of voice sounder product firm Vimpex Ltd were able to offer a solution. A site survey identified that not only were high-output sounders necessary to give the required amount of coverage, but also dual-lingual messages would need to be used. Many workers at the site have Urdu as their first language so to enhance safety Bradford City Council engineers specified dual language sounders.
Some 10 Maxi Fire-Cryers, each with three English-Urdu messages, were installed to give instructions to the workers in the building as to what to do in case of fire or system test. The Maxi Fire-Cryer outputs 116dBA and features a weatherproof enclosure making it suitable for external use and large open areas. The Maxi Fire-Cryer is one of a family of voice sounders that are suitable for fire and evacuation applications. The units require no special wiring and can be retrofitted to existing installations. They can be fully synchronised and have a low current consumption allowing simple replacement of existing sounders and bells. The makres add that the Fire-Cryerโs multi-message capability also ensures that โsystem testโ and โall clearโ messages can be transmitted avoiding confusion with the fire/evacuation alarm.
