Emergency Response Planning in the UAE

All businesses and buildings should have an Emergency Response Plan (ERP). It should cover situations from medial incidents, like heart attacks, to environmental effects such as high wind, flooding and major fires.

The planning of these documents should, of course, start with a risk assessment. If the company in question is modest, then this should not be an overly lengthy or complicated process. However, even for small scale operations, this needs to be coherent and tailored to the business. A small shop operating on an open street is going to have a different outlook and set of challenges to the same shop operating within a large mall.

For something more complicated, for instance that large mall, or a significantly sized residential building, you might want to utilise one of the many risk management tools such as a bow tie risk assessment where you can focus on a hazard and the unwanted event, say a major fire. Through the risk assessment process, you would look at all the items that might lead up to that event occurring, make it more likely to occur or make the outcome of the event worse. You would then ensure you have appropriate controls in place to prevent the event from occurring.

You should also look at your mitigation strategies. Yes, this might include business continuity planning, but this is definitely where your ERP should fit in to. The work that goes into this risk assessment process and subsequent ERP could become complicated, and involve people from different disciplines and areas of expertise to develop. However, the end-product should produce a number of relatively simple and easy to enact procedures of what to do in the event of the identified scenarios occurring.

It’s useful to fall back on an old axiom, “plan for the worst, but hope for the best”. Unfortunately, in our business, we too often see people planning for the manageable and hoping for the best. Make an effort to consider the worst possible scenarios and how it might be possible to mitigate some of these issues.

Once you have conducted the risk assessment and developed the ERP, the next step is to roll out the plan to your team, especially those individuals who have a key role to play such as security, FM teams, general staff, or management. They will need to know what the issues are, the overall plan and what their involvement is. Training for these key individuals should also be provided, start with the basics such as location of emergency exits and fire alarm sounds, before implementing specific training dependant on the operational requirements of your business. Although, every business should have trained first aiders and fire wardens.

Then comes the important part. These plans have to be tested. Again, whilst I’ve come across some health and safety managers that think this means starting a real fire on site, I don’t believe you have to be that dramatic.

For the dry run, it’s best if you let everyone know what is going to happen and when, so they can work through the ERP together. Once you’re confident that everyone knows their roles, you can move onto the more interesting and meaningful drills, where you spring scenarios on your teams and see how well they respond. Just make sure that the emergency services know your plans, so you don’t get any issues with the authorities.

A fair amount can also be learnt by a desk-top exercise, so long as you involve the right people, take it seriously and work through an event in a structured and realistic way. This allows you to talk and walk-through events that are perhaps a little impractical to conduct drills for, well without a Hollywood budget!