Our business at Wrightstyle is to supply advanced glazing systems that protect life and property in the event of fire.
Our systems are also used as acoustic barriers or to provide additional safety when high wind loading is a design requirement.
For example, we’ve supplied systems to a banking giant in Hong Kong, a typhoon area, and – closer to home – to a landmark retail development in Edinburgh.
The frontage of Ocean Terminal, home to the Royal Yacht Britannia, is entirely comprised of our systems.
The overall glazed span at Ocean Terminal is over sixteen metres in height. The largest individual free-span is over 10 metres with grid centres of four metres. That makes it one of the UK’s largest free-span curtain walling structures.
We’ve also tested our systems against both car and lorry bomb attack and, of course, against ballistic attack.
Contain
In other words, our systems either give external protection or, internally, provide compartmentation. That helps contain any fire, minimising the threat to that building’s occupants.
But even we have to admit that there are some fires that our systems are not designed to deal with.
Take, for example, a fire on a farm in the north of England in early March this year.
A group of pigs on a piggery near Leeds ate a pedometer which then ignited when it was excreted.
Copper in the pedometer’s batteries reacted with the contents of the pigpens.
The result was a fire that covered some 75 square metres.
Free-range
The pedometer had been attached to the leg of one of the animals in the pens. It’s used to prove that the animal is free-range.
Luckily, the North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service was soon on the scene to save all the pigs’ bacon.
They later Tweeted about it, while admitting that they should have ‘oinked’ about it.
“In the past few weeks we have mainly been working on a contact for a tourism project in the Kingdom of Jordan,” said Jane Embury, director.
“We are also working on other contracts and beginning to open up our business.
“However, while our systems can be found in all sorts of applications, we don’t expect orders from pig farms any time soon,” she said.
Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash
