Transporting Fire/Life Safety to the Future
One of the largest multi-modal transit systems in the U.S. sought to establish a robust FLS department. Accurately identifying and mitigating FLS hazards while minimizing the impact to operations and maintenance functions were critical to the organization to better serve the millions of passengers it serves each year.
Challenge
The public transportation industry transports hundreds of millions of passengers each year. Maintaining a safe and reliable infrastructure is critical to providing a high level of service, ensuring system safety and increasing public confidence.
Implementing a robust Fire/Life Safety (FLS) program is essential to meeting this objective and enabling organizations to reduce risks, save lives and property, manage fire-related loss, reduce costs, and improve operating efficiency.
With this understanding, one of the largest multi-modal transit systems in the U.S. sought to establish a robust FLS department built on the foundational pillars of a sound Safety Management System (SMS) — safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance, and safety promotion.
dss+Approach
The experts at ADS System Safety Consulting, a dss+ company, were selected to assist one of the largest multi-modal transit systems in the U.S. in establishing its FLS department. The ADS team began by completing an initial gap assessment and technical capacity and capability review to determine FLS needs, resources and capabilities. With this information, the team developed an organizational structure formalized through an executive management charter. An inaugural FLS Director and support staff were identified to lead the new department and launch the new program.
The ADS team then moved on to providing engineering and FLS program implementation support. This included conducting FLS assessments and inspections of infrastructure, providing FLS engineering design reviews and consulting, providing regulatory requirements and fire code analysis, performing egress analyses, and supporting emergency response and management programs. The team also developed a safety risk register to help track FLS hazards and provide sensible and practical risk mitigation solutions.
Assignment
Implement a robust Fire/Life Safety (FLS) program.
Offering
Operatinal Risk Management Consulting
Impact
- Established a model Fire/Life Safety (FLS) Program that directly improves safety throughout the district.
- Accurately identified and mitigated FLS hazards while minimizing impacts to operations and maintenance functions and resources.
- Efforts helped the public transit system win the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Rail Safety Gold Award, the highest safety award in the industry.