
Emergency Preparedness
Our company is having a leadership team meeting to establish plans for certain emergencies. We are in Jacksonville, FL, so hurricane planning is always an annual occurrence. I will be bringing up fire and active shooter response. We are an industrial contractor that works at multiple facilities. Can you guys think of anything else? Thanks in advance!
Comments (12)

NFPA 1600 is a good resource for this.
We do a hazard vulnerability assessment annually to identify our top 5 risks at each of our locations.
We're in Upstate New York, so instead of hurricanes we have blizzards (sometimes up to 3ft of snow in a day, but we average 124 inches per year). We also look at ransomware attacks, electrical service interruption, water service interruption, network outages, etc.

Depends on “what is an emergency” for your location. You might have tornado preparedness & response, chemical spills or releases, disease outbreak, release of biological agents, explosions (maybe nuclear or radiological), etc. Check out the OSHA page for guidance:
https://www.osha.gov/emergency-preparedness/getting-started

Just some things we deal with.
Air Quality issues
Bomb threat
Carbon Monoxide
Hazmat spill
Comms outage
Earthquake (probably not a Florida problem)
Explosion
Flood
Gas Leak
Power outage
Lightning
Tornado

I worked for a HUGE Corporation and we had to do EAP plus prepare a "Business Continuation Plan" so that we could still supply our customers if the operations of the plant were affected! We would get into things like payroll, accounts payable and receivables. We had to have plans to keep our customers in parts! If you are an OEM you better have all this in place! You cause a GM, Ford, or John Deere problems producing vehicles you are not going to remain in business very long! They accept NO excuses!
As far as what you name two good ones, but what about:
Pandemics?
Bomb Threats?
Supply Chain Disruptions?
Utility Disruption
Hackers
Labor Disruption (Strike or the Blue Flu)
Tornadoes and Severe Weather
Hazard Material Spills?
A Safety Emergency where you have a Fatality or several people hurt?
War?
Fire?
It is almost endless.
Not only did we have to make plans we had to do Drills of the plans too. Our plant was near an airport and the landing pattern went right over the plant. I did a drill where one of our Corporate Jets landed short and on top of our roof! That was fun!
PS Do not forget how to handle the Press, TV, and Radio! The last major injury we had the 911 call went our over the police and fire radios. The media listens to police scanners. Our plant is 45 minutes from the closest TV station. In less then 30 minutes we has three TV station vans, three radio stations, and two major newspapers parked across the street from the plant! Our employees are trained to not talk to the Press and refer all questions to Corporate PR. You also need to worry about social media!

In addition to what others have mentioned, a common one that you will probably face more frequently than others that you need an EAP for is medical emergencies. You need to dictate how you will handle medical emergencies beyond self-administered first aid. How will you handle someone in cardiac arrest? How will you handle an amputation? This will coincide with your Bloodborne Pathogens program (and exposure control plan), but those aren't actual procedures.

Emergency preparedness should also be pushed to the home life. Most of my Adult life I was always responding to others emergencies. More than one occasion my wife had to deal with emergencies at home while I was at work. Ensure your essential employees have a prepared household so their family can function to help keep the mission going.
When the mind isn't on the job is when accidents happen.
When we know our home and family is safe we tend to be able to focus on the job at hand.
Mental and Physical preparations go a long way.