The evacuation list: how to get it in three minutes

You can have the evacuation list in three minutes if it is ready before the alarm goes off: one register of employees, visitors, subcontractors and drivers, available as an on-screen view that can be printed or read on a handheld device on the way to the assembly point. A list that has to be pieced together from three systems, logging in to each of them in turn, will not get made during an alarm.

A list like this covers only people registered in the system, so anyone who came in unrecorded is not on it. No software will change that, and promising otherwise is dangerous, because it leads people to skip the physical check at the muster.

What an evacuation list must contain

An evacuation list has to bring every category of person together in one place: employees from the readers, visitors from reception, subcontractors from the organisation lists and drivers from the entry log. The muster coordinator will not merge four separate lists into one in time. In TraxSystem, drivers and vehicle entries are on the list with the base system, while employees, visitors and subcontractors are covered by the People access control module, whose reader limit grows with the size of the base package. The pricing page gives the module amounts for five, fifteen and forty readers.

On a large site the list needs to be split into zones or areas, because two hundred names with no breakdown do not help the coordinator at the muster. Each person should be shown with the company they belong to; with subcontractors, it is their foreman who knows who was supposed to be on site today. The time of the last event, meaning the moment the person came in, is useful too, because it lets you weed out records left open by an unregistered exit.

Why the list is sometimes unreliable and how to fix it

An evacuation list loses its credibility mainly through unregistered exits. Everyone registers on the way in, because otherwise they do not get in, but people leave through whichever gate happens to be open. The register then shows people who are not there, and in an evacuation a list with too many people on it is as bad as one with people missing: the coordinator searches for someone who went home long ago.

The list becomes more reliable with:

• a reader on the exit side, because the direction of passage should follow from the device; that is why a turnstile has two readers,
• visitors returning their cards, because a card issued and not returned is a signal to check,
• automatic visit closure after a set threshold, so that visits from a week ago do not linger in the register.

The muster procedure: what to agree before the first drill

In TraxSystem the evacuation list is a view that is always up to date, so it does not have to be generated as a report. Before the first drill, agree:

• who opens the list and on which device; if the building is being evacuated, the office computer is out,
• in what form the list reaches the muster coordinator,
• who checks people at the assembly point and how they record who is present,
• what happens with people who are not on the list, because there will be some.

The last point shows whether the procedure has been thought through. The list from the system is the starting point for a physical check and does not replace it.

The limits of the evacuation list

The evacuation list in TraxSystem will not include unregistered people, and that is the most important limitation in this area. Nor will it locate people on site: it knows only the zone from the last pass through a reader, if the zones have readers, and the locator applies to vehicles only.

The system will not confirm presence at the assembly point automatically, because checking people at the muster is a human task. Nor does it replace the site’s fire safety instructions or the procedures required by law; it supplies one element of them, the current list of people.

Questions and answers

See also: How many people are on site right now · Lone working on site: the employer’s duties and how to meet them