Safety Knights

We have 3 designated severe weather shelters that are interior bathrooms with cement walls. In training i point out to focus on rooms that are least prone to wind damage (don't have exterior walls and dont have windows). We do have roll call checklists for any type of evacuation that Supervisors/Leads take care.

I highly recommend having multiple locations they can go to, if possible. By designating a single location, you may be making others travel a longer distance to safety, which in the aspect of emergencies, seconds and minutes count. This allows everyone to have options of where to go to, regardless of where they are in the facility, especially if you're 325,000 sq. ft.

In each location, we had a grab bag with a 2-way radio, flashlights, hi-viz vest, clipboard, laminated copies of the emergency action plans, and an updated copy of the company roster. These grab bags were checked weekly (takes 5 minutes to check radio battery levels, make sure roster is most current based on date at top of the page, flashlight worked, etc.).

The lead safety pro was always the person ultimately in charge of the overall head count, but person with the highest ranking and seniority took charge at each individual shelter area and would radio to Safety any issues, as well as who was present or any missing persons.

In potential catastrophic weather events, stress the part of critical thinking during drills, Having Primary, secondary and tertiary evacuation routes and muster points, that could allow for more people to get to safety faster. Using a Table top exercise may be a great way to plan the process before drilling on it.
Larger complexes or building may need individual plans. Drew has a great point about go-bags with all the needed things for incident management in one spot.
One thing I have done is to have the go bags at the rally points and as designated or senior people get there they can start accountability procedures.
People with task are less likely to panic, and when leaders are doing people will follow.
Calm instills calm and Panic created Pandemonium.
Involve more people in writing the plans. One person can't possibly know everything there is. Tap into your resources.
Not a Sermon, Just a thought :)

Victoria - have been in that same situation. I had to deal with boilers on the other side of the shelter walls that made the rooms warm (easily 85 and higher).

Resolution was cleaning out a several other block wall rooms that were used by maintenance, and storage of junk. Work with what you have basically. The facility did have a wash bay that was not being used, and plans to build a closing block wall were created. Work is yet to be accomplished.

Here in Ft Worth Texas last week our Tornado Evacuation went into place without a hitch. there was a storm that blew in less that 4 miles away for our site. We have a concrete structure inside of our building. The sirens went off in the town and everyone in the facility moved smartly into the shelter. We had the entire workforce accounted for and safe in less than 3 minutes. We had spoken about the potential for a storm during our morning supervisors meeting and we had reviewed the procedure and they communicated the signals to our workforce. It was a great exercise and executed perfectly.