Protective response planning

Four procedures sit at the heart of Standard Tier preparedness: evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. They are not four separate documents that happen to be filed together. They are four answers to the same question — what do people do? — under different conditions.

The decision underneath all of them

Everything starts with one judgement: is it safer inside or outside?

• Safer outside, and we can get there → evacuation.
• Safer inside, or the threat is outside → invacuation.
• Safer inside and we need to keep something out → lockdown.
• All three, always → communication.

Which means the most important thing your plans record is not the routes. It is who makes that call, on what basis, and how everyone finds out what has been decided. A venue with beautiful route diagrams and no named decision-maker has the hard part missing.

Evacuation

Getting people out and away. Most organisations have something here already, because fire safety has required it for years — but a fire evacuation and a security evacuation are not always the same thing, and it is worth checking where they differ.

What a usable evacuation plan records:

• Who decides, and who decides when that person is not there.
• The signal — what people will actually hear or see, and how it differs from other alarms.
• The routes, including the ones people will really use rather than the ones on the drawing.
• The assembly point, and a second one for when the first is unusable or is where the problem is.
• Who sweeps which areas, and how they report back.
• How you know everyone is out — and what you do about the people you cannot account for.
• Who cannot use the stairs, and what happens for them.

Invacuation

Bringing people inside, or moving them to a safer part of the building, because outside is the greater risk. This is the procedure organisations most often do not have, and the one that is hardest to improvise.

What it needs to record:

• Where the safer area is — ideally away from external glazing, with more than one way out.
• How many people it holds. Use your fire occupancy figure for the space, or roughly four people per square metre as a working estimate, and check it is enough.
• How people get there from wherever they are, including outside areas and smoking areas.
• Who brings people in from outside, and how far they are expected to go to do it.
• What people do once they are there — away from windows, quiet, phones down or phones out?
• How long you could hold it — water, toilets, medication, people who need to sit down.
• How it ends, and who says so.

Lockdown

Securing the premises so that a threat cannot get in, or cannot move further in. Lockdown is not appropriate everywhere and should not be adopted just because it sounds thorough — but where it is appropriate, it needs to be specific.

• Which doors and access points are secured, in what order, and by whom.
• Whether they can actually be secured — many public-facing doors cannot be locked from inside, and finding that out during an incident is too late.
• The signal, and how it differs unmistakably from the evacuation signal.
• Who can authorise it, including out of hours.
• What people do where they are — lights, blinds, phones, silence, moving away from doors.
• What happens to people outside who cannot get in.
• How it ends, and how people know it is genuinely over rather than a rumour.

Lockdown and invacuation are often confused. Invacuation is about where people are. Lockdown is about what is secured. You can do both at once, and frequently would.

Communication

The procedure that makes the other three work, and the one most often treated as an afterthought.

• Staff — how do you reach the ones not standing next to you? Radio, group message, tannoy, runner?
• Visitors and customers — who speaks to them, and what words are used? Vague announcements produce their own crowd problems.
• Contractors, cleaners, deliveries — people on site who are not on your staff list.
• Neighbouring premises — particularly where you share a building, a car park or a frontage.
• Emergency services — who calls, from where, and what information they will want first.
• Afterwards — families, media, staff who were not on shift, and the people who need to know it is over.

Writing them so people can follow them

These documents will be read by a duty manager under stress, possibly for the first time. Some rules that help:

• Numbered steps, in the order they happen.
• Roles, not names — "Duty Manager", not "Sarah", because Sarah will leave.
• An at-a-glance block at the top: who decides, what the signal is, where people go.
• Photographs of the real place — the actual fire door, the actual assembly point, the actual cupboard the keys are in.
• Short sentences. One instruction per line.
• A version and a date, so people know they have the current one.

Then tell people

A plan that has not been briefed is not a plan. Record who was briefed and when, brief new starters as part of induction, and re-brief when something changes. If someone asked your staff today what the lockdown signal is, would they know?

And put a review date in the diary. Buildings change, staff change, assembly points get built on. The plan that was right in March is not automatically right in November.