Fire Drills & Documenting Attendance
Question - we’re working on our Fire Drill performance and policy/documents and the question came up if we’re required to track attendance from the perspective of the evaluators but also drill runner, not specifically as an area manager (documenting their own workers evacuating their area). NFPA 100 does note that we need to collect date, time and attendance. We’re a hospital (technically a clinic but it’s large) so we could easily have 100+ employees and patients evacuating. We could never collect all people who participated and our evaluators don’t have time to get attendance either as they’re focused on staff, doors operating correctly, exit signs working, etc. I could write down some people I recognize but I couldn’t get a nearly complete attendance list.
Any thoughts on how to address drill attendance requirements in our policy but also during the drills?
Comments (8)
I was in manufacturing, but we put attendance on the Supervisors for Drills! I would audit after the drills to ensure that attendance was taken, just like we had to do on case of a real emergency! I copied my audits and put them in .pdf and stored them in my Drill Folder with a sub-file for the Drill Date and Type of Drill (Fire, Active Shooter, Weather, .....). We had two drills a year, spring was usually Weather Drill. Fall was always a Fire Drill. We usually had Fire Extinguisher Training the same week as the Fire Drill!
One of the other things I did was required all supervisors and managers to send me an email on how the drill went, what went well and what did not. I read them and took notes for corrective action, and saved the emails to a folder with the date of the drill on it!
That's what I did.
Are you a hospital or a clinic? An ambulatory clinic or business occupancy? The fire drill requirements are different for all three.
If you're evacuating, I'm guessing you're a business occupancy. There's no actual requirement to take attendance during a drill. Annex A of NFPA 101 (there is no NFPA 100) suggests documenting participants, but the annexes are not code.
We're an academic medical center, so two hospitals, a university, and associated ambulatory, business, institutional, and residential occupancies.
For the hospitals, it would be impossible to document every participant. NFPA accounts for this by requiring one drill per shift per quarter (so 12 per year at least) and requiring a drill evaluation. We also have a 21 story residential high rise. We could not and do not document that every resident participates in the drill. We spot check apartments but do not check every single room.
For our smaller business occupancy buildings (and 100 people would be small for us) we do make an effort to document everyone, and it's not too bad. Managers do a head count of their people and participate in the evaluation of the drill.
Do you have a head count at your Rally Points?