A fire drill presents the perfect opportunity to tighten up on rules and amend your risk assessment to ensure nothing like this happens in the event of a real fire outbreak. In the event of a fire drill, everything will have to be tested. Of course, one of the most important reasons to carry our regular fire drills is to comply with the law. According to legislation, you are required to fit your premises with an appropriate fire warning system and use it to carry out at least one fire drill every year, during working hours and it must include all staff.
Every time you hire new staff, you should inform them of the fire drill procedure and ensure they are aware of all risks and the formal evacuation plan. Every fire drill you carry out must then be recorded and if the results are less than satisfactory, you should carry out another risk assessment and update your evacuation plan to resolve any potential problems.
I was planning on publishing this topic in the October blog, but other safety items required my attention at that time. Our Rochester clinical labs have just finished conducting and documenting their annual fire drills, and this has given me the opportunity to reflect on the importance of actually having our staff walk through the whole process.
We have learned from our drills that employees have a better understanding of not only their roles during the activity but also how they are part of the whole team that responds to the event.
By actually going to their assigned meeting locations, staff members are reinforcing that memory because during a real event, they will need to act quickly. By walking from their labs to their designated meeting locations, staff learn not only the best route to take but learn about potentially alternate routes and where the stairwells and emergency exit doors are located.
By working with our own security and facilities groups, we have been able to set up the drills so that employees can experience a very real evacuation scenario because they are allowed to make an emergency phone call to the operators as notification of the fire drill, activate the emergency fire pull stations, and use the emergency exit doors.
By doing drills regularly, employees will remember what they need to do—like building muscle memory—as it re-enforces the behavior. While many prefer doing surprise drills to catch everyone unprepared, my opinion is that scheduling the drill at least with the lab supervisors produces a much more desirable result. The lab staff members will have a chance to review their evacuation plans and discuss what they need to do and where to go ahead of time so that during the drill, they will have less anxiety, and the drill will be a learning activity rather than a stressful event that they would remember as a negative experience.
When they have finished with the drill, they will have had a positive learning experience where everyone worked together and they knew what to do. We offer our services across the South East region — for more information, simply get in touch with our friendly advisers today.
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Each time they are carried out, the results must be recorded. Ask us about our fire alarm systems and Fire Extinguisher Service to create an effective fire safety plan today. Fireline a Maryland corporation founded in by John S. Fireline remains a pioneer in the fledgling fire equipment distribution business and we have grown to encompass all facets of fire protection. We can design, install, inspect, or service any type of fire protection system.
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