Fire Emergency Safety Preparedness in the College of Leadership Development Studies Building in Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

Fire outbreaks often occur with the exigency of appropriate response from building occupants in order to safely escape it. Fire safety in buildings is a major design consideration in architecture which helps everyone to escape by way of the most harmless and closest exit point. This research is a case study of the fire emergency safety preparedness in the College of Leadership Development Studies building in Covenant University, Ota in Nigeria, to establish how prepared the building and its users are towards combating a fire outbreak, with a view to identify areas for further improvements. The study adopted a pragmatic research approach that made use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The results revealed that the fire emergency safety preparedness of the college building is low. The active and passive fire emergency safety provisions of the building, exhibited various levels of inadequacies. A significant finding was that there was no provision of any full scale firefighting devices in the building. Also, while most of the respondents can easily locate the active emergency firefighting hand appliances situated in the building, majority of them cannot operate the devices. Fire drills were also found not to be a regular periodic exercise in the building. Some of the recommendations made are that: the building should be retrofitted with the various active and passive fire emergency safety measures found to be lacking; also workshops, seminars and fire drills should be conducted periodically in conformity with best practices