Have you ever been involved in an emergency evacuation practice or drill that dissolved into chaos and confusion? It seems that many organizations are totally preoccupied with speed - how fast can we get them out? This is OK if you have practiced evacuating many times but if not what you should be concentrating on is getting it right and not trying to beat a speed record.

So let's get it right from the start - to put it simply, the purpose of any evacuation procedures is to: Move People from Danger to Safety.

So first of all you need a procedure for getting people away from danger. You may have other procedures for shutting down machinery, fire fighting etc - but what we are talking about here is getting the people out - this is the first and most important objective.

Procedures: These should be short and simple; at a minimum they should cover Fire, Earthquake, Bomb Threat and Medical Emergency situations. You can add in Hurricane, Cyclone, Typhoon and Storm Surge information if this is appropriate. The procedure for each emergency situation should be written in point form (use large print) with a maximum of about six points for each situation. Use one sheet of paper for each emergency situation. If your evacuation procedures are any longer than this you run the risk of confusing people.

The Alarm: It must be possible to hear the emergency alarm at all places on your site. I recommend that you install a two tone alarm which you feed through your intercom system or through well located sirens. With the two tone system, the first alarm you put out is The Alert (beep, beep, beep) - this tells everyone that something is up. If you then want to evacuate, you switch to the Evacuate tone (whoop, whoop, whoop) to get things moving. Having a two tone system gives you more control over what is happening.

Evacuation Practice: Many organisations seem to like to spring practice evacuations on employees without warning and then time them to see how long it takes to get out. This is OK if you have practised your evacuation procedures many times before and everyone knows what to do, but if you only practice your procedures once a year it is totally pointless trying to catch people out - because you will and the practise will be a waste of time.

The purpose of the initial practices is to get everyone familiar with the correct way of doing things - therefore:

give plenty of warning of exactly when the practice will be