Are you ready?

The incident at Sunrise Propane may have caused many companies to reassess their own emergency plans and review safety procedures with employees. Consider these tips from some emergency and disaster preparedness experts.

Be realistic. When putting together an emergency response plan, start with a real hazard assessment of the actual hazards you have on your work site, suggests Peter White from Hot Zone Training, a safety and emergency preparedness training and consulting firm in Cambridge, Ont. Don’t just write a generic plan, but actually go out to the site and make an honest assessment. If you don’t possess the expertise to make that assessment, don’t hesitate to ask the experts.

Know thy hazards. Make sure your employees are trained properly on the specific chemicals that they are handling. Your workers may be diligently going to WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) training every year, but if they are not focusing on getting to know the specific chemicals they interact with everyday, those training may not be as effective as you would expect, says White.

Look out for everyone. When disaster strikes, the safety of your employees is of utmost concern, but so is the well-being of the surrounding community and the people living within it. Be prepared to communicate your safety and emergency preparedness plan to external parties, says John Saunders of the Canadian Red Cross.

Do your homework. Sourcing outside expertise in the event of an emergency can take from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how much homework you’ve done prior to the emergency. Maintain a network of expert contacts that you may require in the event of an emergency, suggests Commander Andrew Kostiuk of the Toronto Fire Services. Doing research during an actual emergency may not be the best use of your time, so make sure that legwork has been done at the planning stage so you know who to call if an emergency occurs.

Practice, practice, practice. It is not enough to simply have an emergency plan written down. Test your plan’s effectiveness by conducting periodic emergency drills or simulations, and make necessary adjustments as you test your plan.
Ask youself: If an emergency strikes today, would we really know what to do?