For conducting any mock drills there are certain steps that should be followed for better performance.
1. Number of maximum credible loss scenarios & number of potential emergencies to be listed out (one time activity)
2. Then make a mitigation plan for the same.
3. Now before doing a mock drill have a table top mock drill/ discussion (where each key personnel of the drill speak about the action to be done by him/her)
4. Then after some time (we follow a gap of 24 hrs at least) have the mock drill.
5. Now during mock drill you should have more than 3-4 observers ( we assign two observers at each location in our organization ) one for noting down the time and the other for noting down the activities done.
6. In any emergency response there are three parts. Evacuation, mitigation and restoration.
7. Evacuation time from each area to the safe assembly point should be assessed based on this formula distance from the place of evacuation to the nearest safest assembly point/6 kmph. ( The speed of brisk walking is assumed to be 5-6 kmph & no running only brisk walk during an emergency)(Here you can apply Chander”s scale and increase the number or size of your emergency exits considering the timings as bench mark)
8. One more practice that we can follow is “you are only responsible to the person sitting at your left” i.e while evacuating just see to it that the person sitting/standing at your immediate left is also evacuated with you.
9. In mitigation part, its as per the onsite emergency plan, but in addition to that we can have more failures added on to the scenario. Eg: Failure of power, then melting of some Sintex tank in the vicinity of a solvent tank fire, ERT collapsed due to SCBA getting empty etc. We should always make sure that all support functions like engineering, R&D etc are involved. The total drill may extend up to an hour also, at times
10. Then last comes the pre entry area toxicity monitoring and the salvage operations.
Now for improving the effectiveness
1. Get the timings and compare the evacuation timing against the standard that you have set and see what is the gap.
2. Timing of each activity, i.e SCBA donning, uncoiling of fire hose etc can be compared against the best timings available( you can get it from experts in this filed or can get from the best industries in your vicinity and assess whether they are acceptable in case of that particular emergency.
3. Vary the time. Mock drills ate early morning time, then during night shifts, then after general shift hours etc.
These! are some methods/steps that we follow in our organization.
Arun Kumar.K
