A real life ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ took place in 2019 when Preston local authorities got in touch with PPM regarding Cubic apartments. A recent cladding survey had led them to carry out checks on high rise buildings. Their visit to Cubic highlighted concerns with the current Fire Safety policies and on Christmas Eve, PPM were instructed to revoke the ‘Stay Put’ guidance and implement a Full Simultaneous Evacuation policy before the end of the day. Failure to do so would result in a Prohibition Notice being placed on the building.
The team at PPM sprung into action, creating and hand delivering updated guidance. They spoke with all residents on site and made sure everyone was aware of the important changes and what action they would need to take in the event of a fire.
Discussions were held and an agreement reached quickly that if temporary smoke alarms were installed and a plan put in place to upgrade the fire alarm system to a L3 standard before the New Year the residents could remain on site.
Thanks to PPM’s strong relations with good, reliable contractors we had the work started by 27th December, this included installing sounders and heat detectors into 48 apartments! Sourcing materials between Christmas and New Year was difficult enough but add in the growing concerns over Covid made this a real challenge! PPM and their contractor managed to get all the essential fire alarm upgrades completed within 4 weeks helping to put residents’ minds at ease and mitigate the concerns of local authorities.
Since then, the freeholder of Cubic has been through the application process for the Building Safety Fund to get the flammable cladding replaced. Previously the high rise had been covered in netting due to the risk of pieces falling and this has been removed too.
Cubic is looking much more appealing in the Preston skyline!