I have six points you should consider when you are planning for an emergency:  

  1. You must plan or schedule the emergency drill. So you should have fire drills at least once a year.
  2. You should have simulations of different scenarios. So these simulations can be tabletop exercises and tabletop exercises consist of either models of your plant with figures of people planning the evacuation routes and the meeting points or walking through an evacuation procedure or point in the event of a tornado like determining where you are going to shelter, what first aid you are going to administer, who you are going to contact, doing roll call and accounting for the stragglers and how you are going to connect with the emergency response personnel.
  3. You should practice these tabletop exercises. Now, an actual emergency situation does not count. You have not planned for it and it is on the fly. Actual emergency situations can be used to analyze your health and safety emergency response program and improve it but they cannot be used as a practice. You must always plan, schedule, simulate and practice the emergency scenarios. So for example, in the event of a medical aid have realistic makeup. It is Halloween so maybe have a bone sticking up if there is a fracture and a lot of fake blood and see how people that need to respond how they react. Surprise them. But make sure that you don’t surprise them so much that an actual emergency is initiated. Let the top people know that it is a simulation or plan.
  4. You must have in place situations to contact outside agencies. So make sure that in the event of a fire that you can contact the fire department, in the event of a flood the appropriate emergency response personnel and coordinate your efforts with them and often have them come into your site and check out chemical storage areas because if they have to respond they may want to know how that chemical reacts when it is burning and they need to plan their best response as well.
  5. Analyze your responses to improve your emergency response procedures. You always want to take your simulations and look for deficiencies and opportunities for improvement and incorporate them into your emergency response plan so it is resilient and strong in the event of an actual emergency.
  6. Use Deming’s plan. Act, do, study, cycle to continuously improve the overall application, implementation and review of your emergency response plan. Make sure that they’re as realistic as possible and the simulations cover all likely emergencies. In this manner emergency response planning will do what it is supposed to do which is to save lives.