Evacuation Planning

Everyone should have an evacuation plan — companies, schools, families, individuals. It is crucially important and it can save lives. Critical Path Solutions helps our clients create evacuation plans and set up and run drills to train the occupants in their building or organization so the plan runs smoothly. What does an evacuation plan entail?

Most evacuation plans for commercial or public buildings or private homes are fire evacuation plans. At Critical Path Solutions, we help those in charge of government buildings, schools, and residential and commercial buildings develop fire evacuation plans. We also show you how to educate the building’s occupants on following the plan and even how to practice and run fire drills.

Fire Evacuation Checklist

An important part of every fire evacuation plan is a fire evacuation checklist. The last thing you want to be doing when a fire breaks out in your home, office or another building you are in is searching for items you want to save. Your first priority in any emergency is to save your life and the lives of others.

For this reason, it is important to invest in a fireproof box to store important documents in such as wills, Social Security cards and passports. Important or sensitive information relating to business is usually stored on a computer, and all this information should be backed up in the cloud so that fire will not impact your access to it. The same goes for important information on your home computer.

These strategies are especially important if you live in an area that is prone to wildfires, where you may have to leave your home on a moment’s notice. A wildfire evacuation plan should include assembling and keeping an overnight bag packed with all your essentials so you can be comfortable once you have retreated to a safe area.

Natural Disaster Evacuation Plans

While most evacuation plans are related to fires, not all are. Many coastal areas have hurricane evacuation plans in place. It is especially important that these operate smoothly, since many coastal areas have only one or two roads that residents can use to get out of town or off the island. Traffic can get bad, and time is of the essence.

Emergency evacuation plans have been made and adjusted many times over the years for the area around Mount Saint Helens, the volcano in Washington state. Eruptions, fires, mud flows, floods and more have threatened the area for more than 100 years, most notably in 1980, when a major explosion killed 57 people.

Evacuation plans are necessary near nuclear power plants as well. Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was famously evacuated in 1979 after a reactor partially melted down, although no deaths have been attributed to that incident.

Whatever type of facility or municipality you own or operate, it is important to have an evacuation plan in place. Depend on Critical Path Solutions for help creating an efficient, effective evacuation plan.