#1 Fire Watch Guard Company in Texas

Fire watch guards are trained, DPS PSB-licensed officers who walk your property on a fixed route, look for fire and hazards, and keep a written log while your fire protection is impaired or while hot work is underway. The service exists to keep people safe and your building open when an alarm or sprinkler system is down, which in Texas often means the gap between a failed inspection and the repair. We supply the guards, the patrol plan, and the documentation your AHJ wants.

OSHA is federal and applies on Texas job sites just as it does anywhere, requiring a fire watch during and for at least 30 minutes after hot work, welding, cutting, or grinding, in areas where a fire could start. That is heavily in play on Houston Ship Channel refineries and oil and gas sites where hot work is constant. The watcher needs fire extinguishing equipment on hand and the training to use it. Your local fire code, layered on top, may require a watch in other situations too.

The fire watch is the duty, the active monitoring of a property while fire protection is impaired or during hot work, and the fire guard is the licensed person performing it. In Texas that guard holds a DPS PSB security officer license and follows the patrol and logging the fire code expects. Plainly: you are required to keep a fire watch, and we send the guards who carry it out.

Texas has no statewide fire code, so the specifics come from the International Fire Code as adopted by your local jurisdiction and enforced by the fire marshal. Generally that means trained guards dedicated only to the watch, set patrol routes covering the whole protected area, a written log of each round, and a clear way to alert occupants and call 911. The exact patrol frequency and coverage are spelled out in the marshal’s order, and we build the watch to match it.

Our job is detection and fast response: the guard calls 911 immediately, alerts and helps evacuate occupants, and uses an extinguisher on a small incipient fire if it is safe. We do not replace your local fire department, who are the ones putting out a working fire. On a refinery, a hospital, or a data center, those first minutes of alarm and evacuation are what the watch is built to protect.

A guard walks a set route covering every protected area on the schedule your marshal’s order sets, often every 15, 30, or 60 minutes, checking for smoke, heat, blocked exits, and hazards. Each round gets logged with the time and the guard’s initials, and anything found gets noted and reported. After Gulf hurricane power loss, patrols also watch for problems from generators and damaged systems. That log is the record the inspector reviews.

Yes, a written log is the core of a defensible fire watch and it is what your Texas AHJ asks for at inspection, so the checklist captures patrol times, areas covered, hazards found, and actions taken. Without it you have no proof the watch actually happened. Our guards keep this log on every shift and hand it over clean, so you can show the fire marshal the coverage was real and continuous.

In Texas the controlling credential is the security officer license from the Department of Public Safety Private Security Bureau, which requires a background check and state-approved training before a guard can legally work. There is no separate statewide fire guard license like some other states use, so the DPS PSB license plus documented fire watch training is what your local fire marshal expects. We staff guards who hold that license and are trained on patrol, logging, and extinguisher use.

A procedure template is the written plan for the watch: who the licensed guards are, the patrol route and frequency from the marshal’s order, what to inspect, how to log each round, and exactly how to call 911 and evacuate if a fire starts. Because patrol intervals come from your local jurisdiction’s adopted code, the template gets tailored to that order rather than copied generic. We write the procedure for your specific site and run the watch to it.