Emergency Planning and Evacuation for Buildings

About this course.

Occupied buildings need emergency plans because when a fire or other emergency occurs, there is no time to work out what to do — people must act immediately and correctly, and only prior planning makes that possible. A plan sets out, in advance, how an emergency will be detected and raised, how people will be warned and evacuated, who will take charge, where people will assemble, and how emergency services will be met and assisted. Responsibility is shared and overlapping: building owners typically carry duties for the building and its safety systems, persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) have duties for the workplaces they operate, and occupiers have duties for the parts of the building they control. Because these duties overlap, coordination between them is essential, and this course explains how planning brings them together.

The fundamental reason for planning is that emergencies unfold too quickly for improvisation. A fire can fill a space with smoke and make escape routes impassable within minutes; smoke, not flame, is the leading danger to life, because it disorients, incapacitates and blocks vision. In those first minutes people will do what they have been prepared to do — or, if they have not been prepared, they will hesitate, seek more information, gather belongings, or follow the crowd in the wrong direction. Research and experience across many building fires consistently show that people tend to delay acting on an alarm, and that clear procedures, trained wardens and rehearsed drills dramatically reduce that delay. A plan exists precisely to remove the need to think from scratch at the worst possible moment.