Providing a fire protection service with the high reliability required by regulations involves significant investments in infrastructure, personnel, training, operational management, licenses and certifications.
Mozzanica is well aware of this, which is why it has activated a UNI CEI 50518 operations center, combined with IoT-based monitoring technology.
You all know Aesop's fable about the young shepherd who repeatedly cried wolf as a joke.
And you know how it ended. This timeless fable tells us something that generations of linguists, mathematicians, and anthropologists have explored, contributing to what is now known as communication theory. Communication requires a sender, a receiver, a message that becomes a signal, which travels through a channel and must be decoded once received to be understood.
All these elements contribute to the success or failure of communication.
In the case of the mischievous shepherd, the problem lay with the sender, but once the wolf actually appeared, the issue shifted to the verification procedures for false alarms. Understandably sick of being fooled, his friends had no such procedures in place. What if no one had been there to hear the cries of alarm? What if the sound of leaves rustling in the wind or the thunder of a storm had drowned out the shepherd's screams?
We've come a long way since Aesop's time, but ensuring that an alarm is effective – namely, not only that it is received and understood at its destination but that it also triggers protective action – remains a task for those involved in alarm reporting.
With regard to fire protection systems equipped with an alarm reporting system, legislators have established clear criteria in recent years.
In all cases where the central unit is not under constant supervision by designated personnel, a transmission system must be utilized. This system ensures that fire and fault alarms, as well as out-of-service notifications (the legislator must have known Aesop's fable), are transferred to one or more alarm and intervention receiving centers in supervised locations. From these centers, personnel can promptly initiate the necessary intervention measures at any time.
Technology and especially the market, while slow to respond to this stimulus, are finally offering compliant solutions. To be designed in accordance with the law, these systems must establish a connection 24 hours a day, seven days a week, between systems built according to UNI 9795 standards, using EN 54-21 certified devices, and an Operations Center that meets the requirements of UNI CEI 50518. This standard codifies the structural elements of the center receiving the alarm and the operating procedures for managing it.
When legislators mandate technological upgrades, it is because the benefits to the community of adopting a higher safety standard outweigh the costs. Although sometimes this trust in the legislators' wisdom is put to the test, this is not the case with the upgrade we are discussing.
A fire is a cost for the community (due to the damage it can cause to third parties, the cost of maintaining an active fire response force, etc.) but it is clearly a cost first and foremost for the victims themselves.
We won't list all the potential direct damages to materials, structures, and tragically, sometimes to people, nor the indirect damages in terms of production halts that a company may suffer, because they are numerous and, and in any case, glaringly obvious. Moreover, the probability of a fire is much less negligible than commonly believed.
This is why the law imposes severe legal consequences at the administrative level on non-compliant companies, as well as at the civil and criminal levels against the individuals in the company who were in charge of but failed to upgrade their fire protection systems.
To be effective, an alarm reporting system must guarantee the transmission and reception of the signal and be able to distinguish between real emergencies and false alarms or malfunctions.
The legislation no longer considers communication based on radio links to be compliant, nor are solutions where a telephone dialer reports the alarm to an ineffectively supervised station, as such configurations expose the company to a level of risk that is no longer tolerable, given other available technology.
Designing and building high performance fire protection systems according to UNI 9795 standards, or managing and maintaining EN 5421 certified dialers is not always straightforward, especially in high-risk industries likes the chemical-pharmaceutical sector.
Despite Mozzanica's decades of experience, these contexts remain challenging. Often, we have to design systems that allow for extremely fast maintenance to minimize the impact on the sterile environments in which we operate.
Personnel must be constantly trained and equipped to handle significant interference risks (from explosive atmospheres to chemical and biological hazards) and comply with regulatory protocols.
Therefore, finding a fire protection service capable of operating effectively in these contexts is not a given. Having a 24/7 alarm and fault management service with certified infrastructure according to UNI CEI 50518 standards, which ensures continuous operational support in case of an alarm, is even rarer.
It might not seem complicated when put this way, but guaranteeing clients a service with the extremely high reliability characteristics required by current regulations, and with almost nonexistent risks of inefficiency, requires significant investments in infrastructure, personnel, training, operational management, as well as licenses and certifications.
Having an operations center that meets these standards specifically means having personnel who ensure their constant presence and attention. To always have an operator capable of intervening effectively, we must think of a team working in shifts to cover temporary absences, planned or unplanned (from lunch breaks to vacations, to temporary absences for physiological needs...).
It's easy to do the math, arriving at a team of at least ten operators; people who must be trained and whose training must be certified. Similarly, an annual certification is required for the operational infrastructure. The Operations Center must have its own servers with a backup system, two or more separate, independent, and hot-redundant event reception systems, and an independent and hot-redundant backup switchboard.
All of this, in a UNI CEI 50518 certified operations center, is housed within a reinforced bunker, with an access control system featuring a double security door, an external emergency generator guaranteeing the viability of the entire system for at least 24 hours, in addition to external uninterruptible power supplies (which can be activated automatically).
The entire site must be equipped with an independent ventilation and air conditioning system, a seismic detection system, a flood detection system, cyclic operator vitality checks, and a network for rapid maintenance and intervention on the Operations Center's systems to keep everything operational.
In addition, the operations center itself must also have an independent fire detection and extinguishing system for both the Center and the Data Processing Center. In this case, the calculations are a bit less straightforward, but fortunately, we've already done the math: over one million euros to manage such a structure, with all the associated responsibilities and without scalability.
Does it make sense to sustain such a commitment? Or is it better to outsource to industry experts who can guarantee the required level of service and professional support across the entire value chain?
What is happening is not just a simple technical regulatory adjustment but a real paradigm shift.
From now on, the required level of safety is such that at Mozzanica, we have decided to eliminate our traditional on-call service – a service that, along with technical expertise and equipment, determines the quality of a fire maintenance provider – and replace it with one guaranteed by an operations center compliant with UNI CEI 50518. An operations center like ours not only provides an infrastructure that effectively locates the company teams responsible for intervening, but if these teams are unreachable or if the fire requires the intervention of the Fire Department, it ensures their activation.
Moreover, the procedures adopted by a UNI CEI 50518 compliant center allow for high discrimination between real emergencies and false alarms. This presents two benefits:
- The Fire Department can adopt more streamlined false alarm verification procedures and reduce response times.
- In the event that a false alarm “slips through” and triggers an emergency call, the company can demonstrate that it has implemented all state-of-the-art measures to avoid a false emergency response, thus protecting itself from accusations of “raising a false alarm.”
Mozzanica, once again a first mover in the fire protection market, has been able to easily integrate this technology because for years it has implemented a monitoring service – See.iT – based on IoT technology.
The new UNI CEI 50518 operations center service, combined with the capabilities of See.iT, allows for detailed, automatic, and remote observation of what happens upstream of the certified alarm reporting system.
To return to Aesop's fable, not only are we able to hear the cry of alarm and determine whether there is really a wolf or it’s just another of the mischievous shepherd’s pranks, but thanks to See.iT, we also know the health status of each individual sheep in the flock.
Of course the system respects the privacy of both the sheep and the shepherds.
Beyond the metaphor, the combination of See.iT and the Operations Center service complies not only with fire and safety regulations (from Legislative Decree 81/08 to UNI 9795 including chapter S.5 on fire safety management in the Fire Prevention Code) and corporate administrative liability (Legislative Decree 231/01), but also complies with all GDPR requirements.
Specifically, the Operations Center that Mozzanica offers its clients complies with both the UNI CEI EN 50518 standard and ISO/IEC 27001-2013, providing very high levels of physical security and cybersecurity.
Whatever solution is adopted, in any case, to be truly compliant with the current regulations, it must be systemic. In other words, it must ensure that the system is able to intervene promptly, as needed.
In fact, many systems fail in the final phase because they are managed by security professionals who lack fire management expertise or, conversely, by fire specialists who are, shall we say, “analog”.
The greater the number of actors and the lower the level of integration, the higher the risk that the cycle will not close and that information, especially regarding faults or inefficiencies, does not translate into a concrete system or management intervention.
UNI 9795 5.5.3.2: the regulation on fixed automatic fire detection and alarm systems
When the control center is not under constant supervision by designated personnel, a transmission system must be utilized. Through this system, fire and fault alarms and out-of-service notifications are transferred to one or more alarm and intervention receiving centers and/or supervised locations, from which personnel can promptly initiate the necessary intervention measures at any time.
The connection with these alarm and intervention receiving centers must be constantly monitored; therefore, the devices used must comply with UNI EN 54-21.