A restaurant on the ground floor of a thirty-seven storey concrete tower on Clarke Road in Coquitlam, finished in 2024. Dining room, kitchen, washroom, back of house. One floor, one tenant, a few hundred square metres.
The plan we wrote for it opens with a line that sounds like a disclaimer and is actually the whole point:
This fire safety plan is only for the unit and not the entire building.
The tower has its own plan. This one covers the restaurant. And the gap between those two documents is where most tenant fire safety goes wrong, because almost nothing in the restaurant’s fire protection actually belongs to the restaurant.
Your kitchen can evacuate thirty-seven storeys
Start with the fact that surprises every operator we explain it to.
The cooking line has a commercial wet chemical suppression system over the hood, which is normal. What is less obvious is how it is wired. In this building the suppression system is an initiating device for the base building’s fire alarm, alongside the pull stations, the smoke detectors and the sprinkler flow. And the plan records the extent of alarm sounding as throughout the building.
Put those together. If the suppression system discharges over a fryer, it does not ring a bell in the kitchen. It puts a thirty-seven storey residential tower into full evacuation, at whatever time of night it happens.
That changes what the staff procedures have to say. The person who pulls the manual release needs to understand what they are about to set in motion, that nobody is to reset anything, and who at the base building to call. The plan carries a training page that supervisory staff sign once they have been shown the manual pull — not a formality, given what the pull does.
You do not have a fire alarm panel
The restaurant has no panel of its own. Its devices report to the tower’s Siemens system, and the Central Alarm and Control Facility is not even in the same building — it sits in the main lobby of the neighbouring building in the same development.
So when the alarm goes, the information about what happened in your restaurant is displayed somewhere you may not have access to, in a building you are not a tenant of. The plan has to tell your staff where that is, what they can and cannot touch, and who to reach.
Half your shut-offs are not in your unit
This is the part that catches people during an actual incident.
| What | Where it is |
|---|---|
| Sprinkler control valve | Base building water entry room, parkade level P1 |
| Main water shut-off | Base building water entry room, parkade level P1 |
| Local water shut-off | In the ceiling by the coolers |
| Main electrical disconnect | Base building electrical room, parkade level P1 |
| Unit electrical panels | Back of the unit, by the rear exit |
| Main gas shut-off | Loading bay, base building |
| Local gas shut-off | Beside the hood suppression in the kitchen |
Three of those are down in a parkade the restaurant’s staff may never have visited, behind doors they may not have keys for. Two of them are in the kitchen and could be reached in seconds. A plan that lists them without saying which is which is no use at two in the morning, so ours separates them and draws both.
The sprinklers follow the same pattern. The restaurant is fully sprinklered by a wet system monitored through the tower’s alarm — and the plan marks it, in the document, as base building responsibility. The tenant does not maintain it. The tenant does need to know it exists, that it is monitored, and who does maintain it.
One of your two exits is not yours
The restaurant has two ways out. Two sets of double doors to the street, which is the main entrance. And a single door at the back of the kitchen that leads into the base building’s corridor.
That second exit is a required part of the restaurant’s egress, and it opens into space the restaurant does not control. If the base building blocks that corridor, stores something in it, or changes the lock, the restaurant quietly loses half its exits and nobody in the restaurant necessarily finds out.
There is a related quirk. One of the tower’s elevators opens directly into the restaurant. It belongs to the base building, it recalls to Level 1 under the tower’s system, and it is not an exit — which the plan says plainly, because a door that opens into your dining room looks like a way out to anyone who does not know better.
There is also no roof access from within the restaurant. Worth stating, because responding crews ask.
What the tenant actually owns
Strip out everything belonging to the base building and what remains is the tenant’s. It is a short list, and it matters:
- the kitchen suppression system over the cooking line, and its service schedule
- ABC dry chemical extinguishers through the unit and a K-Class extinguisher in the kitchen
- battery emergency lighting and exit signage within the unit
- keeping both exits and the routes to them clear, including the one into the base building’s corridor
- the Fire Safety Director and deputy appointments, staff instructions, drills and the training record
- the inspection routine for all of the above
The plan splits the inspection and maintenance schedule into tenant responsibility and base building responsibility, line by line. That split is the most useful page in the document, and it is the one we get asked to reproduce most often when a lease is being negotiated.
How Coquitlam reviews a tenant plan
Coquitlam Fire Department reviews a tenant plan separately from the base building’s, and expects it to show how the unit connects to the tower’s systems — the panel, the sprinklers, the elevator, the fire department access and connections, the hydrant. We submitted scaled drawings of the unit and a pre-incident plan with it, and the department issued its approval letter in late August 2026.
We have now done more than one of these on this street. Ground-floor commercial units in new Burquitlam towers are a recognisable job: the tenant has a lease, a fit-out and an opening date, and discovers late that the base building’s plan does not cover them.
If you lease a unit in a bigger building
Four questions worth asking before you need the answers. Does your suppression system trip the building alarm, or just your unit? Where is the panel that shows what happened in your space, and can you get to it? Which of your shut-offs are inside your unit and which are in the landlord’s parkade? And is your second exit through space somebody else controls?
Most tenants have never been told. We visit the unit, document what is yours and what is the landlord’s, draw it to scale, and submit to Coquitlam Fire Department through to acceptance. Tell us about your space and we will quote it, usually the same day. More on the city’s requirements is on our Coquitlam fire safety plan page.
Need a fire safety plan in Coquitlam?
GetFirePlan prepares CAD-designed fire safety plans accepted by the fire department, with one flat fee and an approval guarantee.
- Fire safety plans in Coquitlam
- Fire safety plan services across BC
- Fire safety plan cost in BC (2026)
- Get a quote — reply within one business day