Can a fire watch be done by building staff?

What the code requires

Section 901.7 of the International Fire Code, which Houston adopts with local amendments, requires an approved fire watch where a required fire protection system is out of service and the fire code official calls for one. “Approved” is the key word: the authority having jurisdiction, in Houston the Fire Marshal’s Office, decides what an acceptable watch looks like, including who performs it, how often they walk, how they raise the alarm and how it is logged. The code does not say the watch must be a contractor, and it does not say staff are automatically acceptable.

What staff can and cannot usually cover

An engineer who knows the building can walk it, spot smoke and call 911, and for a two-hour valve closure on a weekday afternoon many buildings do exactly that. The difficulties come with duration and attention. A fire watch has to be continuous: someone walking on the interval, every hour of the impairment, with nothing else to do. Building staff have other work, go home at five and cannot cover three nights without relief. Hot work adds a second problem: the watch has to stay on the sparks and the post-work period, not on the rest of the building.

How Price Protection fits

Buildings that use their own staff for short impairments call us for the rest: overnight and multi-day watches, emergencies that start at midnight, hot-work watches on construction and renovation, and any watch the fire marshal or the insurer wants performed by trained officers. Our officers arrive with the log, the route and the alarm method, take over from staff without a gap and hand the completed log to the impairment coordinator at the end. This page is a summary, not legal advice; the fire marshal’s answer for your building is the one that counts.

Deciding for your building

Ask the fire marshal what the authority expects for the impairment you have. Ask your insurer what the policy requires. Then ask whether staff can honestly be continuous for the whole duration. The fire watch guards vs your own staff article works through the comparison, and the temporary fire watch page explains how a planned watch is booked.

What a staff fire watch has to look like

If the fire marshal accepts staff, the requirements do not relax. The watch needs a route through every affected area, an interval that is kept, a log with an entry for every round, a person with no other duties for the length of the watch, a method for raising the alarm with the system down and a plan for relief. A building engineer who is also answering maintenance calls is not a fire watch, and an inspector who arrives to find the log blank for two hours will say so. The fire watch log template on this site is the structure to use, whoever performs the watch.