CHAPTER 3: IDENTIFY AND RESPOND TO EMERGENCY SITUATION
Key Objectives
- Identify emergency situation and promptly notify emergency personnel and relevant persons.
- Follow emergency response procedures and comply with instructions to maintain security within limits of own competence and authority.
- Seek information from relevant persons to maintain situational awareness.
- Identify need to evacuate from the work area according to nature of emergency and immediate danger level.
- Select safe evacuation pathway and methods following emergency procedures and instructions and modify evacuation pathway as required.
- Communicate regularly with relevant persons and others in the work area to give and receive instructions.
- Evacuate work area following emergency procedures.
3.1 Identify emergency situation and promptly notify emergency personnel and relevant persons.
- An unexpected event that endangers your workers, clients, or the general public, interrupts or halts your business activities, or results in physical or environmental harm is considered a workplace emergency.
Emergency situations may include:
- Accidents
- Armed or unarmed robbery
- Bomb threats
- Collapse or partial collapse of buildings or structures
- Criminal activity
- Damage to people or property
- Explosion
- Fire
- Natural disasters.
- Spill or release of toxic chemicals or biological substances
- Suspicious packages, objects, people or vehicles
- Terrorism
- Threatening, challenging or aggressive persons.
3.2 Follow emergency response procedures and comply with instructions to maintain security within the limits of own competence and authority.
- All businesses must have emergency procedures in place, and the first step is to plan for and be ready for any emergency.
- The reason for emergency planning is simple.
- Preparation can save lives as well as money.
- An emergency plan aims to reduce the risk of injury to clients, employees, and the public and damage to property and the environment often caused by a disaster.
- Every employee should be aware of their workplace emergency plan.
Limits of own competence and authority for security workers may include:
- Difficulties in meeting designated timeframes.
- Legal knowledge
- Licensing requirements
- Need for back-up support or additional resources
- Own competence level
- Scope of own role and responsibilities
- Situational knowledge.
3.3 Seek information from relevant persons to maintain situational awareness.
- The ability of security personnel to identify, process, and comprehend information about how to survive in an emergency while performing security work is called situational awareness.
- Effective observation is a security guard’s most crucial duty, so it makes sense to find strategies to stay as vigilant as possible.
To maintain situational awareness, security guards need to:
- Identify the subject of threat
- Continually observe
3.4 Identify the need to evacuate from the work area according to the nature of the emergency and immediate danger level.
- Emergencies are unforeseeable events that can occur due to a multitude of factors.
- Members of the organisation should be prepared to act in an emergency to safeguard their safety.
- Although the nature and scope of emergencies vary, many safety precautions implemented in response to the event remain consistent.
Identifying the need to evacuate from the work area:
- Prepare
- Act
- Recover
- Evacuation for persons with disabilities
3.5 Select safe evacuation pathway and methods following emergency procedures and instructions and modify evacuation pathway as required.
- It is critical to ensure that your personnel can be evacuated safely and orderly in the case of an emergency, fire, or tragedy.
- An emergency evacuation plan is a collection of procedures designed by employers to aid in the safe evacuation of employees during a workplace disaster.
- Emergency evacuation plans typically include exit routes, designated safe spots, and the measures to take for each type of emergency.
Selecting safe evacuation pathway and methods:
- Stay in place/shelter in place
- Building evacuation
Circumstances where evacuation methods or pathways may need to be modified:
- Building evacuation plans can be challenging because situations can change quickly and dynamically during catastrophes like fires or shootings.
- In addition, it can be difficult to determine how many attendees there are and whether they fit into any certain category (e.g. elderly, children, disabled).
- Additionally, obstructions like items and transient construction zones can prohibit individuals from using emergency escapes.
3.6 Communicate regularly with relevant persons and others in the work area to give and receive instructions.
- Security officers must develop interpersonal skills and learn to create a friendly, polite environment.
- Interpersonal abilities can assist consumers in trusting you as a security guard and enabling you to recognise when something seems off, in addition to increasing customer contentment.
- Additionally, in tense circumstances, interpersonal abilities can aid in defusing the situation and facilitating a secure resolution.
Strategies to communicate regularly with persons and others in the work area to give and receive instructions:
- Appropriate language
- Protocols and codes
- Following standard operating procedures
Procedures for communicating and collaborating with emergency services:
- Speak with your local council to learn about your community’s emergency management plan.
- Examine the websites of your local emergency services to learn more about what they do.
- Request that your local emergency services come to your workplace to assist you in identifying your risks and ways to manage them.
3.7 Evacuate the work area following emergency procedures.
- All employers must ensure that their employees are trained on workplace emergency procedures.
- This may include what to do in the event of a fire, earthquake, or another emergency; locating emergency exits; and procedures to follow in the event of an emergency.
- These processes are site-specific and should be included in employee training.
- Furthermore, regular drills or reviews of procedures are necessary to ensure that if an actual emergency occurs, everyone is prepared to respond appropriately and safely.
Types of security emergencies:
- Fire
- Chemical hazard