Emergency Planning

Emergencies will always occur.

Their effects might have a great impact to the health and safety of employees, the community, the infrastructure, normal operation, the environment, business continuity etc. Developing emergency planning is crucial in order to provide guidance and needed resources during an emergency. The need for an Emergency Planning is critical for humanitarian, legal, insurance and environmental and societal reasons.

Lack of emergency planning might lead to rapid uninformed decisions, lack of crucial time, inefficient resources, and panicked employees. This is chaos!! A well and thorough emergency planning can help eliminate all those issues.

The Emergency Action Plan (EAP) is mainly focused on employees’ safety, when an emergency occurs. The minimum requirements include:

• Procedures for reporting and communicating emergencies
• Procedures and provisions for emergency evacuation (routes, signage, plans etc.)
• Procedures to account for all employees after evacuation

The Emergency Response Plan (ERP), on the other hand, is ideal for businesses that need a thorough Action Plan for different emergency scenarios. Emergency Response Plan objectives should cover at least the following areas:

• Identification of relative to the business emergency scenarios and associated risks to personnel, the community, the environment, the business continuity and operation and the infrastructure. (e.g., health emergencies like COVID-19 spread, security breaches, hazardous material spills, etc.).
• Forming an emergency response team and assigning specific roles (primary and alternate).
• Establish a procedure for emergency identification, notification, communication and activation of relative emergency processes.
• Identify and make available all necessary emergency response equipment (e.g., first aid kit, rescue equipment, power generators etc.).
• Identify and ensure availability of resources (trained personnel, communication channels and means).
• Train appropriately the emergency response team and ensure all involved are aware and confident with their roles and responsibilities.
• Emergency exercises and drills and productive assessment and improvement of processes in place.
• Usage of knowledge gained from the past; lessons learnt from training, drills, emergencies (occurred to business or to similar ones).
• Establishment of effective communication and collaboration with external emergency services, when required.

Process Engineering might help you identify and develop the proper emergency planning procedures for your business and support you in all the associated processes like planning, emergency training and emergency exercises.