Essential Tactics for Staying Safe in Your Apartment Building

Staying safe in your home shouldn’t be difficult. It should be simple for you to shut your front door and feel safe from anything from break-ins to fires. But it can be harder to achieve if you live in an apartment building, especially if you rent your home. You aren’t entirely in control of your surroundings. Even if you own the apartment, you’re not in charge of the communal areas. In an emergency, getting outside is much more difficult if you have to get down ten flights of stairs, instead of simply walking out your front door. If you live in an apartment building, make sure your home is safe by following these steps.

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Personal Responsibility

The first part of keeping you and everyone in your building safe is taking responsibility to prevent emergencies. Remember that if a fire were to break out in your apartment, it could eventually affect everyone else too. You can help to prevent fires by being careful with any flames, smoking materials or electricals. Anything hot has the potential to heat up enough to cause a fire, so be vigilant about switching off things like hair straighteners. Even a beam of sunlight reflecting off a mirror could cause a blaze.

When it comes to other matters of safety and security, there are still things you can do. To help prevent burglaries, you can have a personal alarm for your apartment. But it’s also important not to let strange people into the building and to watch out for anyone behaving suspiciously.

Emergency Detection and Warnings

Of course, it’s not just you who can watch out for emergencies. You building can also have warning and detection systems to let everyone know of a fire, break-in or other situation. But they’re only useful if they work. Make sure that whoever handles communal areas carries out tests of the alarms and smoke detectors in your building. It’s also a good idea for you to know where and how to activate them. If you have alarms or detectors inside your apartment, you should test them to ensure they work.

Exit Strategies

When there’s an emergency, whether it’s a fire or a power cut, you need to know the quickest and safest route out of the building. You can’t use the elevators, so you need to know which exits to take. If you have fire escapes with stairs leading down to the first floor, you need to know which is your nearest.

You probably have exit lights that point you in the right direction, but you need to be sure they work. Your building supervisor needs to have an emergency lighting test performed now and then to check they’re working. It’s also helpful if you know of anyone in your building who might need some extra help getting outside. You may have a designated safety point outside, where everyone can gather and be counted. Make sure you know where that is too.

You have to take responsibility for your safety when you live in an apartment. But it’s also important to ensure that the right people are keeping you safe too.