A fire strategy is a set of promises about a building, and only some of them are made of concrete. The compartment walls will still be there in twenty years. The requirement that a particular door is never wedged open, that a corridor stays clear, that a member of staff sweeps the first floor before evacuating — those are promises about behaviour, made on behalf of people who have not been hired yet and who will never read the document.

We edit what fire engineers and fire safety consultants produce — fire strategy reports and design statements, fire safety management requirements and building operator obligations, means of escape and evacuation strategy documentation, compartmentation and fire resistance schedules, smoke control and ventilation design documentation, sprinkler and suppression system design narratives, fire engineering analyses and performance-based justifications, evacuation modelling and occupant behaviour assumptions, regulator and approving body submissions, golden thread and information handover documentation, fire risk assessments and remedial action plans, and operational procedures and staff instruction material. Our editors work on the part of a strategy that depends on people.

The management assumptions in a fire strategy are what a building actually stands on, and they are traditionally buried in a section near the end that the operator never receives. A strategy that assumes staff-assisted evacuation, or a permanently unobstructed lobby, or a door held by a device rather than a wedge, has transferred a design obligation to a facilities manager who does not know it exists. We write these so every assumption about management, maintenance or human behaviour is collected into one section that can be handed over intact and read as a list of duties; so each is expressed as a specific action with a frequency and an owner rather than a condition of the building, because "the corridor shall remain clear" is a state and "the ward manager checks and records this at each shift handover" is a task; so the consequence of each assumption failing is stated plainly, since an operator who knows which door protects the only stair treats it differently from one told all doors matter equally; so anything requiring staff numbers, training or presence names the number, the training and the hours; and so the strategy says which assumptions cannot be relaxed without a fire engineer revisiting the design. Buildings whose strategies are written this way survive their second change of ownership.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, strategies and building information. We are editors rather than fire engineers, and we offer no view on fire strategy, life safety design or regulatory compliance. What we can do is make the human half of a strategy legible to the people who inherit it.