Facility Managers Should Plan for Disasters with Realistic Training

A tornado touches down tearing off part of your building. A gas main ruptures on the street outside the front door. A hurricane unexpectedly doubles in strength overnight after veering from its original course and is heading directly towards you.

Be Prepared with a Disaster Checklist

Facility managers need to be ready and willing to consider even the most horrific scenarios and face some potentially worrying truths when preparing for an emergency. And whether the disaster is natural or man-made, unexpected or anticipated for days, being able to protect the building and its occupants requires facility staff to have a plan and be able to execute it.

Each plan will be different, of course, based on the type of building, the location, the type of disaster and even the time of day. But facility managers who have been through disasters say that the keys to a good plan are paying attention to details, taking advantage of advance notice if you have it and not being afraid to assume the worst in training scenarios.

The first step to figuring out a response plan is to think through the myriad details of the impact of the disaster. That could include everything from fine details such as moving the elevator cabs off the first floor in case of flooding to more broad strategies, such as determining where building occupants will evacuate to if necessary. Once those details are determined, they can be tweaked as necessary to account for differences in disasters. For example, an elementary school in Destin, Florida could have completely different evacuation areas for a fire as opposed to a hurricane.

To try to identify every imaginable way a disaster might play out, property managers should hold group meetings to walk through emergency scenarios, with staff and team. Someone should throw out a scenario — with no restraints on severity — and the participants should walk through possible responses while looking for holes in the plan.