Fire Evacuations – Consider your neighbours!
Yesterday I had the experience of working one building over and across the road from a large industrial fire. The photo is the view I had from the front window and below is a link to the NZ Herald article for those that want to see more.
There was a lot of smoke bellowing out and it looked serious enough for us to consider evacuation, particularly if the wind were to change direction and put us in the thick of the smoke, which was remarkably dark and heavy before the FENZ arrived to put out the fire. In fact, we thought that the buildings across the street were evacuating because of the smoke. Turns out that people were just exiting the buildings across the road to go and be nosy at the fire.
And then the dead-end street started to fill up with vehicles of Looky Lou and rubber neckers, to the extent that the roads had to be cordoned off to keep them out of the way of the emergency responders and also to protect the fire hose lines which were laid across the roads.
We watched and monitored the action for about an hour until the fire was quite under control although there was little danger of the fire spreading in our direction as the neighbouring buildings to the fire were solid concrete walls, no windows with steel roofs, and the wind was blowing in a different direction to us. We have experience with the wind directions in the area and knew that it would be very rare for the wind to come to us from the direction of the fire. The wind didn’t change and we didn’t evacuate.
It all made me think about the fire evacuation plans for our church buildings (strange, but true).
Fire is not the only reason to evacuate your building. Smoke from a neighbouring, burning building is also a reason to evacuate. If the smoke hits your building, considering how thick the smoke was in this case, then it is probably already too late to stop inhalation. When do you make the call to evacuate?
If people had to evacuate their buildings and leave work for the day, it would have been prudent to also remove valuable equipment and vehicles, but with all the nosy drivers clogging the street, it would have caused quite a bit of congestion. How then, do you decide how to evacuate a site in this situation?
Have you had a discussion with your emergency response teams about potential events in neighbouring buildings, and does your emergency response plan provide guidelines about how you will respond? In our situation, it was a discussion between two people, if you have a large number of people to organise, then I encourage you to have the discussions now because this fire was a bit close.
Be prepared in case it happens near your place.
Click here for NZ Herald article on the fire