Emergency situations in FM
Dealing with emergencies requires response activities that are focused on four primary functions. They are preserving life and minimizing the collateral effects of the incident, mitigating the effects of the emergency, enhancing incident or emergency response and providing assistance where necessary at the site of the emergency, and establishing a method of recovery whereby the incident or emergency is contained in such a manner as to allow return to normal operations.
Every facilities manager has the daunting task for ensuring there is adequate preparation for any emergency situation wherever they operate. No built environment has immunity from emergency situations. These emergencies can range from generator breakdown, burst pipe, electrical faults to major disasters such as fire outbreak.
It is appropriate for every facilities management department in an organization or outsourced FM company to have a response plan in place to deal with the emergency. A response plan will also be useful in preventing the mission of an organization to be compromised.
No doubt, most facilities managers operating in Nigeria must have experienced one emergency or the other at some point in the course of carrying out their responsibilities when considering our level of vulnerability to potentially dangerous situations. Emergencies are unpredictable most of the time because they are usually unexpected.
Facilities managers operating in the private or public sectors should identify the types of emergencies that can occur and then develop their emergency plan around those eventualities. Emergencies can be categorized into the following types, hazardous material, fire, natural, utilities outage, and terrorist threat emergencies.
A carefully prepared, high quality plan that is robust and thorough will address the various types of potential emergencies mentioned above. Furthermore, such a plan identifies where assistance can be obtained and gives confidence that the FM team is competent in its ability to react accordingly. It is critical to determine the most probable types of emergencies that are likely to happen and assess how vulnerable the built environment is when dealing with each potential emergency.
It is the duty of the facilities manager to include in the plan training requirements, response procedures and steps to be taken to restore normal operations when the emergency has been contained. It is a good idea to document lessons learned from the emergency situation for future use in improving the existing plan.
There are support services that can help to control or mitigate emergency situations. Information on these services should be made available. Such information may include updated contact details, flow chart of command chain, insurance details, and reporting procedures and required documentation.
It is important to have some specific emergency procedures documented and displayed. These should contain information such as means of communicating the emergency situation to all personnel, the exact location of assembly points, the evacuation routes, the method of accounting for all personnel, how to shut down all utilities to the affected areas and how the physically impaired personnel should be evacuated.
Tunde Obileye