What are the steps in preparing emergency response guidelines

The essence of compiling emergency response guidelines is to break down "uncertain emergencies" into standardized actions that everyone can implement. The core should cover several core links such as risk assessment, framework construction, content adaptation, practical verification, and dynamic iteration. It cannot be used by just copying and modifying a general template.

The first step must be to understand the true risk base. Don’t sit in the office and look at the network list to collect risk points. Last year, when I was helping an e-commerce industrial park in Hangzhou make a fire emergency guide, a colleague at first searched for a general template and planned to change it. As a result, we held three symposiums with the park’s security, property management, and resident company administration before we discovered that there are three storage points for daily chemical alcohol in the northwest corner of the park, and two office buildings on the east side. There are more than 15 floors of a personnel-intensive Internet company. Each floor also has two storage rooms for storing laptop batteries. The drainage outlet at the entrance to the park’s underground garage was even blocked for half an hour during a heavy rain. These risk points are not mentioned at all in the general template. If you really follow the guidelines written in the template, you will definitely be blinded when something goes wrong.

After getting the basics, many people are anxious to start writing the specific content. At this time, it is easy to go astray. Many people tend to write guides as internal rules and regulations, with pages full of divisions of responsibilities and punishment regulations. Who would bother to look through those when something really happens? When setting up the framework, you have to follow people's emergency response, just like when you are driving, the navigation will only tell you how to go to the next intersection, and will tell you all 100 intersections if you don't get up. In the first 3 minutes of the accident, no one has the patience to flip through several pages of responsibilities. They have to put the most urgent actions at the front, such as where to press the alarm bell as soon as a fire is discovered, where to put the nearest fire extinguisher, and then the evacuation route, division of labor among various positions, and aftermath.

When the framework was built and the content was filled in, there was actually a lot of controversy in the industry. One group believes that emergency scenarios are inherently full of uncertainties, and all imaginable extreme situations must be listed, even if the probability is only one in 10,000, it can save lives if they happen. The other group believes that front-line responders panic when something goes wrong, and the content is too complicated to grasp the key points. It is better to only list the most frequent and core response actions, and leave the remaining extreme scenarios to professional rescuers. In my own practice, I usually make a compromise. The main text only includes the logic for handling high-frequency scenarios with a probability of occurrence of more than 5%, and the extremely low-probability scenarios are put into the appendix. For example, when I made a rainy season flood prevention guide for e-commerce warehouses, someone suggested not to include the "upstream reservoir burst and destroyed the warehouse" disposal. We finally put this in the extreme scenario in the appendix. The focus of the text is to write about rain leaks, circuit short circuits, and drain plugs, which are encountered every year. Situations that can be encountered every year, such as first-line warehouse pipes, can be used.

Don’t be in a hurry to print and distribute the content after filling it out. The guides that really work are all performed, not written. When we were working on an earthquake emergency guide for office buildings, we initially wrote that "people on high floors should first hide under their desks." However, during the drill, we discovered that the desks in many Internet companies were made of open, ultra-thin plates, which could not stop falling ceilings. Later, we changed the priority to hiding next to the load-bearing columns of the conference room. Employees wearing glasses had to hold on to the wall when evacuating, otherwise they would be squeezed out by the crowd and unable to find their way out. These details cannot be written just by sitting in an office.

Finally, don’t think that everything will be fine once the guide is written. This thing is never a final document. Just like the mobile phone system needs to be updated regularly, it is best to update it every six months to follow changes in the venue and problems exposed in drills. There was a place where the fire protection guide for office buildings had not been updated for three years. The building had a new facial recognition access control. When an accident occurred, it could not be opened when the power was cut off. The guide also said that "the access control should remain open all year round." It almost caused a serious accident. If the guide could be updated simultaneously with hardware adjustments, this kind of pitfall could be avoided completely.