Muir pledges its support for Gas Safety Week 2015
Muir Group Housing Association has pledged its support for Gas Safety Week (14-20 September 2015), and is aiming to raise awareness of gas safety issues and to keep the public safe from dangerous gas appliances.
This fifth annual Gas Safety Week will see organisations across the UK working together to raise awareness of the dangers of poorly maintained gas appliances, which cause gas leaks, fires, explosions and carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. In the last year, at least 68,000 homes in the UK escaped deadly gas incidents such as these, by engineers switching off dangerous appliances. Nearly one in two of these incidents were caused because a gas appliance had not been regularly serviced and had been left in a poor state.
With 20 deaths and 1,000 gas-related injuries in the last three years, it’s vital that people make sure their gas appliances are safety checked every year by a registered engineer. Anyone working on gas appliances while not being Gas Safe registered, is working illegally.
Sam Scott, Executive Director of Operations at Muir said:
“Muir has a duty to ensure that our residents and their homes are safe by carrying out annual gas checks.
“Gas Safety is a serious issue and we want to raise awareness amongst our residents.
"It is important to understand that carbon monoxide can be produced in many different ways not just by a gas boiler or appliance.
"We are therefore asking our residents to be CO aware and ensure that they allow us access when we carry out our safety checks. We also encourage our residents to get in touch with us if they have any issues with their appliances.”
Jonathan Samuel, managing director for Gas Safe Register, said:
“We know from our own investigations that one in six gas appliances in the UK are unsafe, meaning far too many people are victims of preventable gas related incidents. It’s great to have the support of Muir this Gas Safety Week so that we can work together to raise public awareness of gas safety and reduce the number of dangerous gas appliances lurking in the homes of the UK’s 23 million gas consumers.”