Planning for emergencies

Each year, every organisation is required to conduct one evacuation drill in order to meet compliance as per AS3745:2010 Planning for Emergencies in Facilities.

However, these drills can sometimes be carried out poorly with limited feedback for the team, leading to disengagement amongst staff.

It is therefore important for businesses to promote safety and engage their staff in becoming wardens.

FirstAction has identified many case studies of people stepping up as wardens, prioritising the safety of their team.

One such person was Rick Rescorla, a British-born American citizen who was involved in both the 1993 terrorist attack on the basement of New York City’s World Trade Centre and the disastrous 911 attacks.

Rescorla felt that building evacuation had been conducted very poorly during the 1993 attack. After becoming the director of security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley in 1997 he vowed that such a muddled exodus would never happen again.

He developed an emergency plan for Morgan Stanley, ensuring that it was tweaked and practised repeatedly. In addition, he built and designed awards systems that were utilised by the whole Trade Centre. Over time, this instilled confidence in the warden team.

When the 911 attacks took place, Rescorla and his colleagues were ready. With bullhorn in hand, he ordered the Morgan Stanley employees to evacuate the building. Before the second plane struck the South Tower, his colleagues were on their way down the stairs.

Almost 2700 people owe their lives to Rick Rescorla and his team of 15 who carefully and confidently controlled the situations. To every one hundred staff, there were two wardens, directly trained and influenced by Rescorla.

As people evacuated the building, Rescorla turned back for survivors in the South Tower. He was last seen passing survivors on the 10th-floor staircase, but his body was never found.

There were several practices carried out by Rescorla that should be also implemented by other businesses:

• Be very vocal about the importance of wardens.
• Publicly acknowledge the team’s efforts by promoting achievements and standards set in place. This will be seen by other staff members throughout the organisation and encourage them to get involved.
• Offer incentives to the team. Businesses should look at providing lunch on training days, as well as interesting case studies, imagery and videos when recruiting for wardens.
• New staff members should be made aware of their ability to take up a role as warden.
• Leaders should avoid dismissing training and evacuation drills as ‘too hard’ or ‘not necessary’. In addition, all leaders should be directly involved themselves.

Rescorla is a tragic story of a hero. What we can learn from it is more around how he became engrossed with building a positive culture to the warden communities. Rather than focusing on building a warden team purely out of a sense of duty or compliance, he focused completely on the importance of saving lives.

Read the full article on LinkedIn.

Image credit: © aradaphotography/Dollar Photo Club