|
With the rapid development of Taiwan’s economy, small shopping malls no longer satisfied consumers’ demand. Therefore, the establishment of department stores, integrated with complex business items, including dining, supermarkets, furniture, amusement parks and parking lots, has developed rapidly. Moreover, for department stores’ interior decoration in order to meet consumers’ every-changing demand, once the fire occurred, these spaces without using incombustible materials would be burnt out quickly. Based on the characteristics of high fire load and the decreasing alertness for consumers in comfortable environment, such as the fire incidents for Jinsha Department Store in Taichung City and Tsai-Shen World Department Store in Chiayi, they all caused serious property loss. Furthermore, after suffering from serious losses in major fire incidents, advanced countries have developed a specific autonomous system of fire prevention management, which would be autonomously managed by employees and advised and instructed by fire protection experts, so as to enhance the safety for places in question. This would make the researcher aware of the fire safety issues.
This study focused on the fire prevention management of department stores in Kaohsiung City, and compared the development of Taiwan’s fire prevention management system with U.S.’s and Japan’s systems. With questionnaire survey, the study investigated the current fire prevention management system in Taiwan’s Fire Services Act and then proposed several feasible suggestions. In addition, the follow-up analysis was made with integrating the package software, SPSS FOR WINDOW, to be the reference for related laws revisions in order to respond to the every-changing and diversified fire prevention management for department stores, so as to upgrade the current fire prevention management system and practically implement the idea of “Protect your own properties”. Thus, to improve the resilience in the incident scenes is the purpose of this study.
The results of the research showed that the fire prevention management systems would not be different in terms of varied sexes, service units, work shift time, and educational levels, but that they would be diversified on the basis of job positions. This conformed to the requirement for requesting managers and supervisors to be the fire prevention management level that clearly indicted in current laws. However, there were differences between these two companies in this study based on the addition of fire prevention management personnel, the competence level, and the communication method between shop fronts and fire-fighting personnel. This indicated different implementing effects under different cultural backgrounds.
|