Necessity of Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans
An individual escape plan for the person who isn’t able to reach a safe place unaccompanied in the situation of an emergency is known as a personal emergency evacuation plan (PEEP). In this post, we shall discuss the importance of the personal emergency evacuation plan and its factors. Here we go.
Do you really need a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan?
According to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999, an employer needs to implement effective emergency evacuation arrangements for all employees.
The objective of a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan is to provide safety to the person who can’t help himself out of a building unaided with the best possible escape route in the event of an emergency.
Importance of Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan
There are many benefits of implanting a personal emergency evacuation plan or PEEP. Let’s find them out below.
- Keeps Employees Calm
In most cases, employees of an organization panic in an emergency as they don’t know what they need to do in the situation. After panicking, the employees lose focus and start behaving irresponsibly or dangerously, which makes the situation unmanageable.
With an evacuation plan in place, the employee can follow a specific guideline during an emergency to evacuate the building. As the evacuation plan consists of many steps, each step calms the employees and helps them to focus on the task of evacuation.
- Designated Meeting Place
Generally, employees in an organization without any evacuation plan prefer to leave the building as soon as possible and then get scattered according to their convenience. For example, some drift to their vehicles while others will run to find a safe place.
One of the best reasons to implement emergency plans is to let employees know where to go after getting out of the building. You should know that getting together after an evacuation helps the officials keep the headcount of the people.
It also gives an idea to the employer or the authorities about the people who have been evacuated or should be evacuated. After the employees are gathered, the authorities will call emergency people to inform them about the stuck people in the building and where they can find those people.
- Expandable to Visitors
Employees are not only the people who need to get evacuated from the building during an emergency. There are many other people who need to evacuate the affected area like clients, vendors, and visitors. A properly written evacuation plan with marked exit signs, evacuation routes, and safety coordinators can help the visitors to leave the building safely.
An evacuation plan decreases the risk a visitor faces in an emergency. Even if the person is not familiar with the building can make his way out through an evacuation plan.
- Regular Route Inspection
Unused spaces and hallways become dumping grounds for several things. Over time, those little piles of junk block the important exit routes that help you leave the building during an emergency.
An evacuation plan helps an employee to follow the exit route calmly in a measured manner. According to experts, every escape route must have light bulbs and first aid kits at different junctions so that the affected people can use them to treat themselves.
When an organization has an evacuation plan in place, the authorities regularly inspect the route to ensure everything. Cool heads and clear plans play a major role in avoiding the casualty in the affected area.
While there are many benefits of having an evacuation plan in place, we have mentioned the major advantages above.
The Bottom Line
It would be best to identify and analyze the workplace hazards and risks so that you can prepare safety plans accordingly. Instead of hiring a non-experienced or cheap company to create an evacuation program, it would be best to choose a reputed and experienced professional organization to create a perfect emergency evacuation plan.
As it is about life or death, you don’t want a novice to create an emergency plan for your workplace. When you have known the benefits of the evacuation plan, start working on it for your organization.