A restaurant’s kitchen is its beating heart. It’s here that the restaurant’s distinctive dishes and flavors are conceived and developed.All the flammable liquids, high temperatures, plenty of paper products, electrical equipment, and motorized gadgets in the kitchen make it an enormous fire threat. Many restaurant fires occur every year, resulting in millions in property damage, injuries, and deaths.To avoid fatal restaurant fires and to keep your staff and guests safe, you must know the common causes of restaurant fires and the measures you can take to prevent a fire in your commercial kitchen.
Common Causes of Restaurant Kitchen Fires
When you and your staff are aware of your restaurant’s most serious fire hazards, you can assist in preventing a fire from spreading and spreading quickly.
Here are the top reasons why restaurants catch on fire:
- New appliances connected to obsolete wiring, a kitchen overloaded with appliances above their capabilities, or the installation of defective switches, sockets, or plugs increases the risk of sparks, overheating and fire, even explosion. Furthermore, frayed or defective cords, regardless of how new they are, run the risk of sparking and catching fire.
- Open flames are the most obvious danger, but there may be a more subtle rationale for their use. Things like kitchen towels, pot holders, loose clothing, and long, dangling hair can easily catch fire and provide the fuel needed to spread an open flame across the kitchen, resulting in instant injury and the possibility of the fire spreading elsewhere.
- Cooking Oil, Animal Fats, Grease, and Alcohol are all examples of flammable liquids that are common in restaurant kitchens. Beyond being highly flammable, liquids’ fluidity allows fires to spread and behave dangerously while also making them difficult to extinguish – you cannot simply douse a liquid fire with water.
- Food packing, wrapping, and boxes, as well as materials such as parchment paper and foil, are all potential fire hazards in restaurant kitchens. When these things aren’t stored or disposed of correctly, they turn into ready-to-light kindling and are a typical cause of restaurant fires.
- 5. Dirty equipment (oven hoods, grease traps): Grease is extremely combustible and almost omnipresent in your restaurant’s kitchen. It quickly spreads and accumulates on cook tops, exhaust hoods, ducts, and other surfaces in your kitchen, giving them ideal fuel and pathways for a fire to develop.
This problem is exacerbated by overflowing grease traps. Articles of food and even paper are easily sucked into a grease trap. Adding more hot grease increases the risk of a fire starting in these products.
- Some of the worst restaurant fires have been started by gas leaks. When equipment is not correctly connected to a gas line or when older or inadequately maintained equipment can no longer withstand the gas flow, explosive events may occur. Poor connections allow gas to leak into the atmosphere, where it has the potential to explode if ignited by something in the environment. To set off an explosion, all it takes is the lighting of a match or the activation of electrical equipment.
Fire Protection Every Restaurant Kitchen Needs
When it comes to fire suppression, fire companies have introduced new technology to reduce fire risks, especially with grease and oil fires. Fire extinguishers developed specifically for kitchen risks use these suppressants in hood suppression systems and special classes of extinguisher. Even there are Fire alarm System that can alert in time in event of any flame or risky situation where fire is broke and is in early stages.
Using a kitchen hood suppression system can help put out a kitchen fire before it has a chance to spread, and it does so without taking the kitchen out of service.
Grill, fryer and range hoods are common places for these restaurant fire suppression systems to be placed (thus why they are often referred to as hood suppression systems).
When the system detects a fire, nozzles positioned above the kitchen appliance release a particular wet chemical that deprives the fire of oxygen. These devices also turn off the gas supply to the appliance as soon as they are activated, so that no more fuel can be added to the fire.
As a result of this fast-acting, autonomous technology that cuts the gas and extinguishes the fire before it starts, the restaurant can continue to operate with minimal disruption. In the kitchen, manual activation levers are also provided so that personnel can activate the system if they become aware of a fire threat before the system automatically activates.
For the greatest suppression system for your kitchen utensils, talk to SMART GAS SERVICES LLC. If your restaurant cooks using vegetable oil rather than animal fat, the temperatures will be much greater and require a different form of chemical suppression that is more effective at higher temperatures.
Fire Extinguishers:
Extinguishers come especially handy when a fire does not develop on a cooking surface where gas is being used to feed the flames, but rather when a spark falls on surrounding supplies and needs to be swiftly smothered.
Class K fire extinguisher utilities a liquid to put out a fire, it’s crucial to turn off the electricity to any cooking equipment before using one, due to the risk of electric shock. However, due to the presence of oils, greases, and fats, you must ensure that your employees have access to the appropriate extinguisher. Class K fire extinguishers employ a fire suppressant that can suffocate a fire without accidentally spreading it, even if it contains grease or oil.
Need Help Protecting Your Restaurant?
SMART GAS SERVICES LLC’s professionally trained staff can assist you whether you currently have a hood Fire Suppression system or need help selecting and installing fire safety elements in your restaurant. They may also help if you just want to improve training for your employees.
