Russ 1977 raised the point about the number of drills per year and what is or isn't a fire Drill. I would like to ask what happens after the drill? What are the conclusions from the drills that are carried out. I know the obvious answers are to meet statutory and legal obligations, in ensuring that the building can be evacuated in a timely manner ... But what about what happens next? Do any of you take these drills to the next level and test your business continuity plan? I know of a business that had a fire alarm activation evacuated as per the well rehearsed evacuation plan, however the staff did not know what to do next.. After 40 minutes of being at the assembly point, the management started to think about the welfare of the evacuated staff. When asked why it took so long to make a decision, it was explained that no one knew what to do next. I would suggest that as H&S Managers we should be proactive in asking management on what plans are in place beyond the basic fire drills...

You could give feedback forms to the fire marshals, or even the staff, after the drill so they can comment on what worked well and any areas for improvement. This often highlights any downfalls in the plan and helps you think about ways to improve, as well as any bottlenecks in the building and any additional training needs, such as people trying to go the wrong way.

While I fully agree with Kate and catlong I believe the question was more about testing your systems if this was a real emergency, in other words what happens if after the evacuation has been completed you don't say "thank you very much everyone - back to work" We experienced this a while ago. We had to evacuate one of our buildings and for certain reasons we were not able to return for over 6 hours. Our fire marshal pack contains a series of "management action cards" to deal with these situations, and after a short while when it became clear we were not going straight back into the building this pack was handed to the senior manager on site. To which she said "what do I do with this?" as she had missed the desk top training exercise. Fortunately there were enough of us present that had been involved in the development and training of the procedures we could help her through it. End result. Some staff were sent off to other sites' some decided to finish early for the day, and it was all OK, but it was interesting as we had not tested the system before.