The 1980s Government Building: When the Fire Door Paperwork Didn’t Match

I've always thought one of the biggest problems with older fire doors is that people can become too confident in the paperwork. If the paperwork says fire door, it gets treated as a fire door. If somebody has inspected it before, it gets treated as having been checked. If it has been in the building for 30 or 40 years, people assume it must have been there for a reason. But what happens when you actually look at the doors and the paperwork doesn't match? That is exactly what happened to me in a government building. It was a seven-storey building from the 1980s The building was seven storeys and had been built in the 1980s. From what I understood, the doors had been surveyed and inspected over the years and had apparently passed those inspections. So on paper, there…