The bakery on Derwent Way occupies a one-storey tilt-up concrete building from 1979, with a mezzanine. On the ground floor are the baking floor, the packaging area, a flour silo room, a cooler and a freezer, a compressor room, a maintenance shop, a welding room and the loading bay. The mezzanine holds offices, a boardroom, the lunchroom and change rooms. It is a food plant, and nearly every unusual thing in its fire safety plan comes from that.

Matching the sprinkler to the room

Most buildings have one kind of sprinkler system. This one has three, and each fits the room it protects.

The general plant is on a wet system, with water in the pipes all the time. The flour silo area on the south west side is on a dry system, where the pipes hold air until a sprinkler opens. The cooler and freezer are on a pre-action system. In a pre-action system the pipes stay dry until a separate detection signal tells a releasing panel to let water in, and only then can a sprinkler head discharge. That protects a freezer from water in its pipes and from an accidental discharge onto food.

For the people who work here, three systems means three sets of valves and three ways a system can be out of service. The plan lists each one, what it protects, where its valves are and that the fire alarm supervises it.

Two alarm panels

The bakery has two fire alarm control panels, each monitored by a different company, plus the releasing panel. The bakery’s own panel, by the main entrance stairwell on the south side, takes the pull stations and a smoke detector in the electrical room. The second panel belongs to the base building and is connected to the sprinkler systems. Its annunciator is on the bakery’s north mezzanine. Either panel sounds a full evacuation.

The valves are next door

This was the hardest part to write clearly. The bakery shares its site with neighbouring premises, and the base-building panel, the main control valves for the wet and dry systems, the main electrical disconnect and the main water shut-off are all in the neighbouring address’s rooms. The bakery has isolation valves for its systems on the south side of the north mezzanine, along with the pre-action valve and its releasing panel, and a local electrical shut-off in its own electrical room on the north west side.

So the plan has to tell bakery staff, plainly, what they can shut off from inside their own building and what they cannot. It has to tell a fire crew that the main valves are in the other address’s sprinkler room. The fire department connection is on the west side of the property beside the neighbour’s loading bays, which is another reason the site drawing shows all of the addresses on the property and not just the bakery.

Flour, oil and gas

The hazards are the ones a bakery brings. There is an 11,000 litre cooking oil tank on the north side of the building and a dust collector whose bin is emptied regularly. The welding room has compressed gas cylinders. The maintenance shop and the mezzanine storage room have cabinets of lubricants and aerosols, and there is a caged chemical storage area above the compressor room.

The plant keeps a full chemical inventory, from oven and pan cleaners and disinfectants to food-grade compressor lubricants, and the safety data sheets for every product. All of it is bound into the plan as an appendix, which is why the finished document runs to 316 pages. Most of those pages are reference material. The working part of the plan is the first twenty or so, which tell staff and firefighters where everything is. Our article on fire safety plans for warehouses and industrial buildings covers how we handle chemical lists in plans like this.

The plant has four exit doors and two stairwells that lead straight outside. City hydrants line the street, and there is a private hydrant in the parking lot. Roof access is from the east side of the north mezzanine.

Delta Fire & Emergency Services registered the plan in June 2025. For more on fire safety plans in this city, see our Delta page.