Fire drills
How often do you guys run them, and do you include your local fire department? We do our manned buildings once a year and include the first responder team.
Comments (10)
We would run fire drills every quarter unannounced to see how the training has paid off. It is done every quarter but never scheduled.
I was providing basic material handling sessions as part of a client's safety stand down day.
They incorporated a fire drill into the schedule (everyone knew what time it would be). Everyone met at the rally point, but it became difficult for them to do a check of who was there/who wasn't. Typically, they group by department in the rally point area. For the stand down, employees were mixed into groups with employees from other departments to encourage them to get to know each other better and each group was given a different color t-shirt commemorating the day. When it was time for the fire drill, instead of grouping by departments, they grouped by color of the shirts and it took several minutes longer to figure out who was where.
Make sure that you get everybody to understand where they are supposed to be, regardless of what is happening in the workplace on a given day.
Working on this as well, once per year seems to be the go to on evacuations/fire drills. I did read that if your alarm goes off for a false alarm, you can count that as a drill but make sure you document it and any corrective actions that need taken.
1 time per year, not always with the fire department
At my old job we did it once a year when the fire alarm company came to test the alarms (early November). Local fire department was not present but they were notified we were testing our alarms. Then everyone complains that they have to go outside. I get great joy out of it.
