What are the steps involved in preparing emergency response guidelines?

The core steps in compiling emergency response guidelines can essentially be divided into two core sections, namely the early stage of full-scenario risk investigation and treatment path anchoring, and the full-cycle implementation verification and dynamic iterative optimization.

Don’t underestimate the step of preliminary research. It’s not just about changing the name of the company using a general template on the Internet. Last year, we helped an old textile factory in the suburbs make a fire emergency guide. It took two weeks just to identify the risk points. The cotton yarn piled in the raw material warehouse caught fire, 70% of the old workers in the workshop who were about to retire were slow to respond, and there were a lot of idle textile equipment piled at the end of the fire escape in the southwest corner. Without understanding these practical problems, the written guide was just a castle in the air, and it would not be used at all if something happened. After the investigation is clear, the corresponding handling logic will be determined. Who will be responsible for calling the fire alarm, who will be responsible for turning off the power, who will take the lead in evacuating old employees with limited mobility, and where the temporary settlement will be located so as not to block fire escapes.

Many units feel that they are done when they reach this point. They print out the guide and distribute it to various departments and then shelve it. In fact, this is only half the journey. To make the first draft, I had to get front-line operators to practice it several times with real guns. When I was making an emergency guide for electric vehicle fires in the old community, the first draft said "the property management staff will complete the clearance of 5 meters around the fire point within 5 minutes." The result was only in the actual drill. It was discovered that during peak hours, the door of the unit was full of shared bicycles and tricycles for picking up children, and it took at least 8 minutes to clear the area. The terms were adjusted on the spot, and a prerequisite was added that "grid workers regularly inspect and clean up debris at the door of the unit during off-duty hours." Moreover, the guidelines are not meant once and for all. This year, the community has installed smart smoke detectors that can automatically alarm, and next year a new centralized charging shed for electric vehicles will be added. The corresponding treatment steps must be updated accordingly. Otherwise, after three to five years, they will be out of touch with the actual situation.

The industry now actually has different views on the weight of these two steps. Friends who are involved in emergency response in the hazardous chemical industry generally feel that risk research must be thorough and detailed, and even extreme scenarios with a probability of one in 10,000 must be covered. There are also colleagues who are involved in grassroots community emergency response who feel that the guideline is too complicated for frontline personnel to remember. If you can't help it, it's better to focus on the core scenarios and streamline them. In fact, both ideas are correct. The core is to look at the applicable scenarios. An incident in a hazardous chemical park is a major accident. Naturally, the risks must be arranged as detailed as possible. The focus of the guide for ordinary communities is that everyone can understand and learn it. Too long-winded will be counterproductive. Don't tell me, I have seen a community write the guide like an academic paper before. It is densely packed with several large pages. It was posted on the bulletin board for more than half a year and no one read it. Later, it was changed to a large-print version with comics. The core steps are marked in red. During the drill, everyone can get the key points at a glance, which is much more efficient.