How Do You Create a Fire Escape Plan?

1/25/2022 (Permalink)

Every employee in your building must know of at least two ways to escape from every room.

What Are the Steps to Making a Fire Exit Plan?

As a business owner in Clear Lake, TX, you may be concerned with protecting your employees and the valuable contents within your building from fire damage. While protecting those items is mainly an issue of not letting a fire start in the first place, your employees’ lives are both more valuable and easy to protect. Making sure you have a sound fire escape plan in your building is an essential safety measure. It’s not enough to just tell your employees to evacuate in the event of a fire, however. A concrete, laid-out fire escape plan is crucial in assuring everyone’s safety. Here are a few pointers to make your plan easier to design, as well as some things it should include:

Check Smoke Alarms

First and foremost, you must be sure your building meets NFPA standards for smoke alarms. This means a smoke alarm in every room and office, and outside every major working area. Also, while it’s highly unlikely that your employees will have this problem, it’s important to verify that everyone in the building knows what a smoke alarm sounds like so that they can evacuate immediately upon hearing it.

Plan Escapes from Every Room

As an important part of your fire escape plan, every employee in your building must know of at least two ways to escape from every room. If every room does not already have two means of escape, it’s a good idea to create them. For example, for rooms on higher floors, a fire escape ladder on the outside can help ensure employee safety and escape in the event of a fire.

Establish a Meeting Place

Make sure every employee in the building knows where the designated meeting place outside the building is. This makes accounting for everyone easier after evacuation and creates a more orderly and efficient escape process.

Practice

It may seem like overkill, but an important part of any effective emergency escape plan is regular drills. You should conduct fire drills at least twice a year, or until everyone in your building can complete the evacuation process within a reasonable but short time period based on the size of your building.