Is a Fire Extinguisher Mandatory in the Workplace in Turkey? Regulation, Responsibility and Inspection

When a labour inspector or a fire brigade inspection team walks into a facility, one of the first things they look at is the red cylinders in the corridor. For most business owners the question is simple: is keeping a fire extinguisher in the workplace actually mandatory, and if so, how many are enough? The answer is yes; but the obligation is not met simply by having a cylinder hanging on the wall. The type of the extinguisher, its location, its accessibility, its maintenance and the record of that maintenance are all part of the same duty.

The picture seen most often in the field is this: the facility has enough extinguishers, but some have expired labels, some have ended up behind shelving, and some sit in the kitchen as the wrong class. What gets written up in an inspection is rarely a missing cylinder; it is a system that does not work. This article explains, in order, which legislation the obligation comes from, who carries the responsibility, and how to set up an arrangement that is ready for inspection.

It is written both for facility and occupational health and safety managers responsible for fire safety in businesses and for the companies that provide refilling and maintenance services to those businesses. The two sides look at the same question from different places; what they share is the need for the paperwork shown at inspection and the cylinder on site to match each other.

Which legislation makes fire extinguishers mandatory in the workplace?

The main basis of the obligation is Turkey's Regulation on the Protection of Buildings from Fire. This regulation governs the fire precautions to be taken in buildings regardless of their purpose, and treats portable extinguishers as an integral part of those precautions. The type, number and placement of extinguishers are assessed according to the building's occupancy class and hazard level. In other words, an office, a warehouse and a production workshop do not get the same answer.

The second basis is occupational health and safety legislation. Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 places a duty on the employer to be prepared for emergencies, firefighting and first aid. The Regulation on Emergencies in Workplaces, issued under this law, covers the emergency plan, support staff and drills; the Regulation on Health and Safety Measures in Workplace Buildings and Annexes requires suitable firefighting equipment to be present in the workplace, easy to reach and clearly marked.

These three layers need to be read together. The fire regulation describes the physical equipment of the building, while the health and safety legislation describes the organisation that will use that equipment. A business that hangs the cylinders but does not include them in its emergency plan, and does not show its support staff how to use them, may look compliant in one layer and still fall short in the other. That is why inspection questions come from both directions at once.

• Regulation on the Protection of Buildings from Fire: presence, type, placement and maintenance of the equipment.
• Law No. 6331: the employer's general duty to be prepared.
• Regulation on Emergencies in Workplaces: plan, team and drills.
• Regulation on Workplace Buildings and Annexes: accessibility and marking of the equipment.

Which workplaces does the obligation cover?

The short answer: effectively all of them. The fire regulation classifies buildings by their use; almost every use other than residential, meaning office, retail, storage, industrial, accommodation or assembly buildings, falls within its scope. A small shop with a handful of staff and a factory employing hundreds of people are both required to keep extinguishers. The difference lies in the type and number of devices.

Being a tenant does not remove the obligation. A common misconception is that extinguishers in shared areas belong to building management, while those inside an individual unit belong to no one in particular. The employer's health and safety duty covers its own working area; making sure that the employees in the rented unit can respond to a fire is the employer's responsibility. Agreeing a written division of duties with building management for the shared areas makes it clear at inspection who is responsible for what.

Hazard class is the second factor that determines scope. An arrangement that is adequate for a low-hazard office will fall short in a high-hazard chemical store. That is why using the business next door as a benchmark, on the grounds that they have this many cylinders too, is misleading. The business's own risk assessment should establish what kind of fire could start in which area and which extinguisher would respond to it.

How many extinguishers are needed and where should they go?

Quantity is the question businesses are most curious about, and the one that can least be answered in a single sentence. The fire regulation ties the required number of extinguishers to the size of the area and its hazard class, and it requires a separate assessment for each floor and section. As a general principle, the aim is that a person can reach the nearest extinguisher from any point within a short time. The exact number should be calculated by applying the relevant provisions of the regulation together with the business's hazard class; having that calculation done by a competent person and putting it in writing is the strongest basis you can have at inspection.

The points to watch in placement produce the same mistakes in the field again and again. Extinguishers should be located on escape routes and especially close to floor exits, so that the person responding keeps an exit behind them. The cylinder should be mounted at a height where it will not be blocked, is easy to see and easy to lift down. An extinguisher hidden behind a pallet, boxes or furniture exists on paper but does not exist when the fire starts.

• First, mark and number the position of every cylinder on the floor plan.
• Next, check how close each point is to an escape route and an exit.
• Finally, confirm on site that the signs can be seen from a distance and that nothing stands in front of the cylinder.

When the layout changes, the placement must change too. A warehouse whose racking has been rearranged, an office where a partition wall has been added or a workshop with a new machine line may mean the old placement is no longer valid. Businesses that do not record these changes on the placement plan run into a mismatch between plan and site at inspection.

Choosing the right type of extinguisher

Meeting the obligation requires the right type of device in the right place. Extinguishers are distinguished by the fire classes they put out, and the TS EN 3 standard series is the basis for portable devices. Multi-purpose dry powder or foam devices are preferred in areas where solid materials burn, carbon dioxide devices at electrical panels and in server rooms, and devices suitable for cooking-oil fires in commercial kitchens.

A typical mistake in the field is buying a single type of cylinder for the whole facility. It is true that a dry powder extinguisher covers a wide range of fires; but used in a server room it can leave the equipment with serious cleaning and damage costs. In a commercial kitchen, tackling an oil fire with an unsuitable device can spray the burning oil and make the situation worse. The type is chosen according to the combustible material in the area, not according to what is easiest to buy.

When choosing the type, it helps to ask these questions in order:

• What is the main material that could burn in this area: solids, liquids, gas, metal or cooking oil?
• Is there live electrical equipment, and can it be isolated during a response?
• Will the residue of the extinguishing agent damage the equipment in the area?
• Are the people who use this area able to carry and operate this device?

The answers to these questions should be entered into the written risk assessment. When the inspector asks why this type of device is here, that assessment is the justification you show.

Maintenance, refilling and labels: the invisible half of the obligation

An extinguisher hanging on the wall does not prove that it works. The fire regulation requires portable extinguishers to be checked and maintained periodically, and TS ISO 11602 is the reference standard for how that maintenance is carried out. In practice this means visual checks at set intervals, periodic maintenance by an authorised company, and pressure testing at certain points over the life of the device.

User-level checks are something the business can do with its own staff, and they are usually done monthly. The points to check are simple but easy to skip:

• Is the cylinder in place, is the space in front of it clear, is the sign visible?
• Are the safety pin and seal intact?
• On stored-pressure devices, is the gauge needle in the green zone?
• Are there dents, rust or cracks on the body, or tears in the hose?
• Has the last maintenance date on the label passed?

Authorised maintenance is a separate job: opening the device, checking the extinguishing agent and components, refilling if necessary and fitting a new label. The label shows the device's next maintenance date and the company that carried it out. The item most often written up at inspection is expired labels, because cylinders are spread across the site and in most businesses it is not possible to see from a single list which one is due for maintenance and when.

An extinguisher that has been used, however little was discharged, should be sent to an authorised company for refilling. Hanging a half-empty cylinder back in its place means facing the next fire with a device that has lost pressure.

What is asked at inspection and which documents should be ready?

At inspection, the mandatory requirement to keep fire extinguishers in the workplace translates into being able to verify the devices on site with documents. A labour inspector, the fire brigade or an insurance loss adjuster each look from a different angle, but they ask for similar documents. The presence of a device in the facility does not show when it was last maintained, who maintained it or who is able to use it; the records do.

The core documents to keep ready are:

• Extinguisher inventory: number, type, capacity and location of every device.
• Periodic maintenance records and details of the maintenance company.
• User-level monthly check sheets.
• The emergency plan and the list of support staff on the firefighting team.
• Drill records and evidence of the training support staff have received.

Inspectors often sample: they pick a few devices from the list, find them on site and check the label. If a device is not where the inventory says it is, or if the date on the label does not match the date in the record, the reliability of the whole record system is questioned. That is why the inventory must be updated when a cylinder is moved, and label dates must be entered into the record after each maintenance visit.

The picture is similar from an insurance point of view. After a loss, whether the firefighting equipment was maintained may be questioned. A business without maintenance records will struggle to prove that its devices were in working order at the time of the incident.

Who is responsible: the employer, the maintenance company and employees

The owner of the obligation is the employer. Supplying extinguishers, having them maintained, training employees and preparing the emergency plan are all the employer's duties. This duty is not handed over by signing a contract with a maintenance company; the company does the maintenance, but tracking whether it was done on time remains the business's job.

The maintenance company's responsibility is the correctness of its work and the record of it. The company is obliged to carry out maintenance in line with the standard, fit labels with the correct information and give the business a breakdown of the work done. In practice, the hardest part for these companies is tracking the maintenance dates of hundreds of devices spread across many customer accounts and facilities. If it is the inspector, rather than the company, who notices that a customer's cylinders are due for maintenance, there is a gap in the service relationship.

The role of employees should not be underestimated either. Health and safety legislation requires that support staff who will act in emergencies are appointed and trained. A support staff member should not just recognise the extinguisher but should have actually used it in a drill. Someone who knows where the cylinder is but has never pulled the pin will lose critical seconds in a real incident.

• Employer: supply, tracking maintenance, training and the plan.
• Maintenance company: maintenance to the standard, correct labels and a record of the work.
• Support staff: knowing where the device is, being able to use it, taking part in monthly checks.

Common mistakes and how to prevent them

The first mistake is treating the obligation as a one-off purchase. Cylinders bought when the facility opened fall out of maintenance over the years and stop matching the changing layout. An extinguisher is an inventory item with periodic checks; it is reviewed again at every maintenance cycle, not just on the day it is bought.

The second mistake is leaving the record to the maintenance company. When the company changes, or its archive is disorganised, the business is left with no historical record at all. The business should keep its own inventory and maintenance history as well. The same applies from the maintenance company's side: recording each customer account's devices one by one, with dates and locations, strengthens both planning and the assurance given to the customer.

The third mistake is separating drills from extinguishers. Many businesses run evacuation drills but never demonstrate extinguisher use in practice. Yet if the emergency plan defines a firefighting team, the team's ability to use the devices should be shown in a drill.

• First, take an inventory of all existing devices and give each one a number.
• Next, collect the next maintenance date of every device in a single list.
• Finally, put monthly checks and the annual drill on a schedule and record the results.

Conclusion

Keeping fire extinguishers in the workplace is mandatory; but what the legislation asks for is more than the cylinder on the wall. Devices of the right type, in the right place, maintained and recorded, together with a team able to use them, are what meet the obligation. What causes problems at inspection is usually not a missing device but a mismatch between the situation on site and the records.

The most reliable way to build this arrangement is to manage extinguishers as an inventory: the location, type and maintenance date of every device should be visible in one place, and devices approaching their maintenance date should be spotted in advance. At Yangın Takip, we designed our software for exactly this need, so that fire safety companies can track their customer accounts, the devices at each facility and periodic inspections in one place.

Related reading

• İşyerlerinde yangın tatbikatı zorunlu mu? Mevzuat ve periyot — https://yangintakip.com/en/blog/isyerlerinde-yangin-tatbikati-zorunlulugu-mevzuat-ve-periyot
• İşletmeler İçin Yangın Güvenliği Yasal Zorunlulukları — https://yangintakip.com/en/blog/isletmeler-icin-yangin-guvenligi-yasal-zorunluluklar
• Inspection & Reporting — https://yangintakip.com/en/cozumler/tetkik-ve-raporlama