The office I am working in now is an office + warehouse type. And being a foreign company, safety is our foremost imporant priority. It is almost a routine that at least twice a year we need to have fire drills.
In case you do not know what fire drill is, it is an exercise whereby the fire alarm will be manually triggered, as a mock fire had taken place, to make the alarm sound and record the time to evacuate all the people to a safe assembly area away from the office.
It seems the national ruling is fire evacuation should take no more than 4 minutes from the time the alarm is trigged. However, kudos to my office mates, all the time, we always manage to do it within the allowed time frame with extra time to spare. It seems that everyone is so used to walking down the stairs and head towards the assembly area and can do it automatically without a hazzle. Or maybe perhaps my office mates are so scared of fire that when they hear the alarm, the will go running out like there is no tomorrow and hence, beating the time allowed flat!!
Anyway, the most bizzare fire drill I ever seen is in an electronic factory down south of Malaysia. When I was there, there happens to be a mock fire drill and because the factory is a populated by nearly 500 people, they have called the local firemen to come along for this mock fire drill.
So as the alarm went off, everyone is seen to walk towards the assembly area. Then, about 5 minutes later, a fire engine alarm broken the silence. The mock was so real, there are even 'actors' pretending to be injured and trapped inside the office where the firemen need to evacuate them from the 2nd floor window using the skylifts. There is even blood stain on the 'actor's' shirt. I wonder if they used tomato ketchup or real blood from animals?
Anyway, there comes the bizzare part. As we all assembled at the safe place, the security guard locked the gate of the factory, not allowing anyone to exit the building. I don't understand this action of his. Funny, there is a fire happening inside the building and the security guard to not allow anyone to leave the factory compound??? What logic is this? Good this it was a drill only, if the real fire is sighted, I am sure the security guard will be beaten for not allowing people to leave the building and pretty sure the gate will knocked down by the people trying to run for their life to safety.
However, again as usual the fire drill in my office had went off really well. No injuries was recorded, the time taken is 2 minutes and 56 seconds. 100% evacuated! I wonder if the real fire had taken place - touch wood, will my office mates still able to maintain this record or will they do even better?
Have a safe workplace and work safely peopole.
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2 comments:
The fire drill I experienced in UK was rather big... The whole building, which house probably up to thousand over people was evacuated, with 2-3 fire engine coming along.
There was a bomb threat when I first came back to Malaysia, in my work place. No one give a sh!t about the incident, there wasn't even a siren or evacuation announcement made. Everyone was strolling down the stairs to exit the building compound. Some even stopped at the corridor near the suspected area to peek about.
HI Vinegar, perhaps your office mates is so used to false alarm and tend to ignore it? Anyway, a word of advise, better be safe than sorry.
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