Fire control survival guidance – Water survival

The consultation for the National Operational Guidance for survival guidance including water survival guidance has now commenced. The consultation will close at midday on Monday 10th May 2021

The draft publication has been created to guide fire control personnel when providing water survival guidance to a single call, however the guidance can be applied multiple times.

It provides guidance on the practical application of water survival guidance from the point where it has been established that the people at risk are unable to evacuate. It has been written to complement other pieces of guidance, including Emergency call management – people at risk.

Emergency call management – people at risk will cover guidance that is applicable to all calls involving people at risk, including:

• Evacuation guidance
• Reassurance to callers
• Multiple calls about people at risk
• Joint situational awareness

Following the peer review and subsequent consultation of the Fire survival guidance within a building guidance, the fire control project team have continued to work on a suite of survival guidance.

During this process we identified that information contained within the fire survival guidance was relevant to a variety of survival guidance scenarios. It was therefore decided that this information would be extracted from the fire survival guidance hazards and control measures and added as a hazard of Calls from or about trapped people at risk, with associated control measures. This will be followed by a full suite of survival guidance, which will contain hazards and control measures specific to the situation and context of the survival guidance call.

The draft publication includes the generic survival guidance in addition to the water survival guidance. We are currently seeking consultation on the water survival guidance elements only. The generic survival guidance elements have already been subject to consultation as part of the fire survival guidance building publication.

What happens after the consultation has closed?

All the consultation responses will be considered by the content team with appropriate amendments made, prior to the draft guidance being presented to the Project board. If you have any questions about the consultation, please email FireCPO@nationalfirechiefs.org.uk

How to participate in the consultation 

• We recommend that you read the draft Survival guidance including water survival guidance.pdf content before completing your review, a draft online version is available to view by clicking here
• Hyperlinks to places within this guidance, or to other sections of guidance may not currently function; this will be addressed at point of publication
• Please provide sufficient detail in your comments for us to determine what content they relate to, along with the line number of the pdf document
• Read through all the questions in the Consultation survey of Water survival guidance Microsoft Forms.pdf before starting the consultation
• It is not mandatory to respond to all the survey questions; you are welcome to only complete those areas that you have an interest or expertise in
• Please be aware that you will need to complete the survey in one session; for this reason, we strongly suggest that you capture your responses in the below Consultation survey of water survival guidance – Word version.docx before transferring them into the online survey, so that you will not lose your feedback in the event of technical issues
• When you are ready, please click on this link to complete the survey: Water survival guidance survey

Thank you for taking the time to complete the consultation survey. Your views are important to us.