Fire safety preparedness in workplaces in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the level of fire safety awareness among workers and the level of fire safety practice in workplaces in Port Harcourt. The primary data were collected by means of questionnaires administration to 210 workers randomly selected from 5 out of 8 Local Government Areas at different workplaces in Port Harcourt with response rate of 100.  The workplaces covered in the study are Construction, Health Sector, Education, Exploration and Production, Oil and Gas Servicing and others. A two-stage cluster random sampling method was used to select the study population. Twenty questions were designed as questionnaire parameters; the first ten are to assess the level of fire safety awareness amongst workers while the second ten are to evaluate the fire safety practice at workplaces. Each question (parameter) is of objective format with only one correct answer. The approach was necessary to facilitate the evaluation of Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W), that is, the degree of agreement amongst the respondents. The results revealed that 65 out of 100 respondents confirmed knowledge of both fire safety awareness and practice in their workplaces. Most workers (61%) do not know how many types of portable fire extinguishers exist and majority of workplaces do not conduct fire drills to test their emergency preparedness. The gaps found were mainly in the Health and Education sectors.  Kendall’s analysis revealed a high degree of agreement among respondents on both fire safety awareness (0.99) and fire safety practice (0.98), respectively.

Keywords: Fire safety, awareness, practice, Kendall’s Coefficient, greater Port Harcourt.