Posted By David A Jones
assuming a full evacuation takes place, then it can be counted as a fire drill. Same applies if it is a real evacuation (i.e. fire).

As long as you undertake a planned fire drill every six months (approx) if no false alarm evacuations occur then you should be fine.

The point of the drill is to get people to understand and remeber what to do etc in the event of a real fire - so a false alarm is just as good as a planned drill.

The benefit of planned drills though is that you could set up scenarios that prevent the use of certain exit routes as if they were blocked by a fire

Posted By Paul Leadbetter
If you are going to use false alarms as drills, it is important that the planned exercises make life more difficult for staff by denying access to some escape routes or ensuring that someone is a 'casualty' left in the building.

Paul

Posted By Lumpy
Firstly, a false alarm can be counted as a drill if you go all the way ... oooo errr.

I never understand why people state 1,2,4 etc drills per year. If your fire Cert (if you have one) states two per year, but it takes people 45mins to evacuate that is obviously not acceptable. You could meet your target of two drills but what is the point if people do not evacuate promptly.

For my own organisation we time how long it takes people to evacuate the building from the time the alarm sounds. If they are out within 2.5 mins then that demonstrates that the employees understand their training/instruction and we don't hold another one for six months. However if it takes longer than 2.5 mins to get people out then we will hold another one in the near future, and so on until we hit the 2.5min target.

We also ask several people not evacuate and hide to see if they are identified as missing in the roll call. We also nominate people as a "fire", and they block certain routes forcing others to find another way out of the building.

Challenge employees, don't have a set frequency, have a minimun but base the actual number of how good drills are.

Lumpy