Emergency Planning

The times in which we live present evolving risks that can threaten your facilities, your employees and your business. Traditional workplace emergencies such as fires take on new hazards with the prevalence of materials like lithium-ion batteries and 3D printing fluids. Changing weather patterns mean that sites now must prepare for weather threats that were once considered rare but are now becoming common. And acts of violence, whether internal or external, can bring tragedy to an unprepared workplace.

We can review and update your emergency plans, taking all threats into account. Not only will your emergency plans comply with OSHA, EPA and other requirements, but they will also be in plain language that employees can understand. We can also provide training and develop emergency exercises for your teams.

Training and Exercises

Too often, emergency plans sit on a shelf and gather dust (or hide behind an icon on a screen). To be effective in an emergency, employees need to know what is in the emergency plans, including what is expected of them. Our instructors have decades of experience in emergency response and bring real-world expertise into the classroom. We teach your employees at your site using your plan with customized training materials, while adding our knowledge and experience. We can provide anything from basic emergency reporting and evacuation training up to and including advanced HAZMAT and HAZWOPER courses.

Don’t need instructors but too busy to develop the courses you need for training? Have a lot of remote workers? We can take your emergency plan and develop regulatory-compliant training then provide you with the training materials you need, and conduct train-the-trainer classes. We can also train remote workers via Zoom, Skype or comparable software.

Once employees know what they are supposed to do in an emergency, it is imperative that they practice. Depending on the site, practice could be as simple as a fire drill with evacuation or as complex as a chemical spill with victims to rescue. Emergency exercises can be functional, where employees actually perform their emergency duties, or tabletop, where emergency leaders are presented with a scenario and work their way through it with discussion. We believe exercises are training opportunities and are the best place for mistakes to be made. We work with you to develop and execute real-world scenarios that challenge your personnel without giving them no-win situations. Employees and managers who attend our exercises come away with the knowledge and confidence to respond more effectively to an emergency.

Executive Crisis Preparedness

When an emergency evolves and becomes a threat to the business, it becomes a crisis. And, undoubtably, the organization’s leadership team will become active in addressing the crisis. Some executive groups handle their crisis well: controlling the narrative, addressing the issue and focusing on the end results. Others team make avoidable errors that damage the organization’s reputation, extend the crisis impact much longer than necessary and create financial damage. We have been in the room providing advice during crisis events with executives and have learned what it takes to lead from the top during a crisis. We can show your leaders the crucial mistakes other executives have made that resulted in crisis failures, while promoting successful examples where leadership teams controlled their crisis through clear communication, heroic decision making and strategic thinking. Executives will learn crisis management basics, examine case studies, and test their skills with a real-world crisis exercise.

Crisis Response Assistance

In the midst of a crisis, you need people who have been there before. We have extensive experience with managing crisis events such as industrial fires and explosions, chemical releases, oil spills, hurricanes, tornados, flood impacts, transportation accidents, and public evacuations. We can help guide you in your conversations with regulators, the media, the public and your employees. We can help your counsel prepare for potential litigation and initiate a privileged investigation if requested. Whether our response is on-site or remote, you can rely on us to provide advice that comes from years of experience managing events that you may be going through for the first time.