What are the steps to prepare an emergency response guide?

The compilation of emergency response guidelines must follow the four core steps of "exploring risks, establishing links, verifying feasibility, and dynamically updating". The essence is to reduce the full process rules of prevention beforehand, handling during the incident, and review afterward to implementable details. It is not just a matter of copying online templates and changing the name of the unit.

It sounds very general, but when you actually start doing it, you will know that the first step is to explore the risks and soak in the scene for a few days. When I was helping to make a fire emergency guide for a resettlement community in the suburbs, I initially wanted to use the framework of the office building I had built before to modify it. However, after two days of patrolling the building with the property management, I overturned all ideas: the east unit of No. 1-3 of the old building has flying wire charging. Residents account for 30%. Many fire alarm bells on the 5th and 6th floors, where elderly people live alone, have long been broken. The fire exit at the north gate is blocked by electric vehicles picking up children studying for evening classes at night. If you don’t stay close to understand these scenario-based risk points, the written guide will tell everyone to take the elevator and go to the north gate to gather in case of a fire. Isn’t that just harmful to people?

After figuring out which areas are prone to problems, you have to smooth out the link of "who gets in first and what to do when an accident occurs". Don't have everyone rush to call 119 when an accident occurs. Many small and budding problems could have been eliminated early, but instead the best time to deal with them was delayed. At that time, we set up a three-layer response logic for the relocation community: the volunteer firefighters on each building were the first responders. After receiving the alarm, they rushed to the scene to verify the situation. Whether it was a false smoke alarm or a real fire. If a small fire occurred, use the fire extinguisher in the building to deal with it first. ； Property security posts are mobilized to clear blockages in fire escapes and unlock fire hydrants. ； Community workers connect with residents, especially knocking on the doors of elderly people living alone, and contact their families simultaneously. Many units always like to write a bunch of names like "leader and deputy leader of the emergency leadership team" when making guides. If something really happens, no one will know what they should do. It is just to show off and deal with inspections. A truly useful guide must specify the responsibilities down to "who takes which set of keys to open which fire hydrant door", so that there will be no confusion.

Don’t be in a hurry to print the draft after you finish it. You have to drag everyone involved through the deduction several times. It is best to conduct two practical exercises to test the water. There are many processes that are written down in the office. If you run them once, you will know how far from reality they are. I have been in contact with an Internet company before. The emergency guide for a power outage in the computer room that I wrote at the beginning required the operation and maintenance to rush to the site to restore it within 10 minutes. It turned out that their computer room was in a suburban industrial park, and the operation and maintenance team usually worked in the city. Even if there was no traffic jam, it would take 40 minutes at the fastest. I wrote it purely on my head. Later, problems were discovered during the deduction and the process was changed directly. The on-site operation and maintenance of the industrial park responded first, first received the alarm and conducted preliminary investigation. The operation and maintenance of the urban area rushed over at the same time, and the time was suddenly stuck.

Oh, by the way, the industry currently has different views on the granularity of the guide. One group advocates that the more detailed the writing, the better. They even clearly list "how to unplug the fire extinguisher" and "what information should be clear when calling the police". This is suitable for communities and business districts where there is a large flow of people and many non-professional handlers.； The other group advocates leaving enough flexibility and only defining the core responsibilities and bottom-line rules that cannot be touched. There is no need to block every step of the operation. Otherwise, when encountering special situations that are not covered in the guide, everyone will not dare to adapt to the situation. This type is more suitable for scenarios such as chemical industry and industrial production where emergencies and variables are large. There is no absolute right or wrong between the two ideas. Just match your own scenario needs.

Finally, there is a link that is most easily missed. The guide is not a dead document that is shelved after printing. It must be dynamically updated as the scene changes. For example, a new row of express lockers was added to the north gate of the relocation community this year, and stranded express items often block emergency channels. On the other side of the road, we directly added the responsibility of "clearing out the stranded express mail next to the counter before get off work at the express delivery station every day" in the guide. We also specially assigned emergency passage keys to the staff at the delivery station, so that if something happens, they can clear the passage as soon as possible.

To put it bluntly, a good emergency guide is never a thick stack of documents to prepare for inspections. It is an operation manual that everyone can pull out and flip through two pages to know what to do when an accident occurs. If you put more effort and make two more trips to the scene when compiling it, you can avoid a lot of troubles when an accident does happen.