Emergency procedures – flowcharts
Joseph McHugh and Sandesh Sheth describe how to construct an emergency
procedure flowchart.
Introduction: Emergency procedures are the foundation of any crisis management plan.
The objective of the emergency procedures is to be able to protect lives and minimize
damage to assets and to try to ‘nip the incident in the bud’ before it escalates into a
disaster. The authors developed the following emergency procedures flowchart during
the implementation of a business continuity management system. The process flows
depicted by the flowcharts enable easy understanding and also provide a quick
reference guide for all concerned.
Caveat: Please adapt them based on your organization’s uniqueness.
List of incidents covered: emergency response procedures are used to address
incidents that may occur during routine operations. Below is a list of some of the
incidents that would trigger the initiation of emergency response procedures:
Emergency
Response
Procedures
Fire
Explosive
Devices
Civil
Disturbance
Power
Outage
Water
Incident
Severe Wind Snow
We will address each of the emergencies in detail in the following flowcharts.
Need: The need is to create flowcharts that convey the first actions to be carried out and
the escalations and process flows based on the emerging scenario.
Before the construction of the flow charts the following need to be defined:
• Primary contacts
• Emergency response team members
• Crisis management team members
• Floor Marshals
• Roll call / head count lists
• First aid trained personnel
• Emergency service providers contact numbers
• Emergency contact numbers for all employees
• Vendor contact numbers
• Call trees for employees, contractors and vendors
• Floor plans with detailed information
• Building evacuation drills