When the code requires a fire watch
Washington adopts the International Fire Code. Under IFC 901.7, when a required fire protection system is out of service the building is either evacuated or an approved fire watch covers every area left unprotected. In the City of Everett the Fire Marshal’s Office sets out exactly what that means, and the dividing line is eight hours.
Notify the Fire Marshal’s Office, your monitoring company and affected occupants. The watch may be kept by the service company technician or by an employee of the owner who is at least 21.
The fire watch must be kept by a licensed security guard from a third-party company, with an invoice verifying employment. Your own staff no longer qualifies. A signed Fire Watch Acknowledgement goes to the Fire Marshal’s Office, and your insurance carrier must be notified.
That second box is the part most building owners find out too late. Past eight hours it stops being a judgement call about staffing — Everett requires a licensed third-party guard company, and requires an invoice proving it. That is what we are.
A fire watch can also be required for construction and demolition hazards (IFC 3304.5), hot work (IFC 3504.2.1), nuisance and excessive false alarms, and for places of assembly where the fire code official decides crowd size or the nature of the event warrants it.
What Everett actually requires of the watch
These are not our house rules. They come straight from the Everett Fire Marshal’s Fire Watch Guide, and they are what an inspector checks against:
Patrols throughout all areas of the building.
Same coverage, longer interval.
The watch runs continuously until the system is restored by a certified company and verified by the Fire Marshal’s Office.
Time, areas toured and checked, conditions found, initials — for every single pass.
Submitted to fmo@everettwa.gov every day until the watch is terminated — not at the end.
Constant patrol and watching for fire. The officer cannot also be covering a lobby or a gate.
Officers also need a means of calling the fire department, knowledge of where the extinguishers are, and the authority to get occupants out. They are not expected to enter private apartment or hotel units, and they do not fight fires beyond what any citizen would.
Everett sets the rules above for buildings inside the city. Lynnwood, Marysville, Mukilteo, Edmonds and unincorporated Snohomish County each have their own fire authority, and intervals or paperwork can differ. Tell us the address and we will work to the right jurisdiction’s requirements.
What our fire watch officers do
IFC 901.7 is specific about this: a fire watch officer performs constant patrols of the protected premises, keeps watch for fire, and carries at least one approved means of notifying the fire department. Their only duty is the fire watch — they are not also running access control or covering a lobby.
On arrival our officer confirms the impaired system and the affected area with your site contact, agrees the patrol route and interval, and confirms how the fire department will be called. From then on every pass covers the areas the impaired system would normally have protected, including the spaces people forget — stairwells, mechanical and electrical rooms, storage, roof access and any area where hot work was performed.
The log has to go to the Fire Marshal every day
Everett does not just ask you to keep a fire watch log. It requires the log on site and a copy emailed to the Fire Marshal’s Office daily, until the watch is terminated. On a 30-minute interval that is 48 documented passes a day, every day, each one with the time, the areas toured, the conditions found and an initial.
Kept by hand on a clipboard, that is where fire watch quietly falls apart — a sheet filled in from memory at the end of a shift is exactly what an inspector is trained to distrust, and a gap in the log is what gets a building fined or red-tagged after an impairment.
Our officers log every pass the moment it happens: time, officer ID, the areas covered and photographs from the property. You can open that record while the watch is still running, so if a pass slips you know that night rather than at the inspection — and producing the daily copy for the Fire Marshal is not a scramble at 5pm, it is already written.
Hot work and construction fire watch
Hot work needs a fire watch during the work and for not less than 30 minutes after it finishes — because the fires that matter usually start after the crew has packed up. Everett treats cutting, welding, brazing, soldering, grinding, thermal spraying, pipe thawing and torch-applied roofing as hot work (IFC 3504.2.1), and an Operational Fire Permit may be required. We cover the work area and the spaces next to it — including the far side of walls and the floor below, where sparks and conducted heat actually end up.
We already provide overnight security on construction sites across Snohomish County, so fire watch can run alongside site security on the same contract and the same log rather than as a second vendor with a second invoice.
Who calls us for fire watch
Property managers and building owners during a planned sprinkler shutdown or an unplanned alarm failure. Apartment and condo communities where an impairment affects occupied units. Retail centres, offices, warehouses and industrial buildings. Contractors running hot work or waiting on commissioning. Facilities where an insurance carrier requires documented coverage during an impairment.
We are based in Everett and run patrols across Lynnwood, Marysville, Edmonds, Mukilteo, Bothell, Mill Creek, Lake Stevens, Snohomish and Shoreline every night, so this is genuinely local coverage rather than a crew driving up from another county.