Taken from this post in another thread: Airplane simulators: How can they be trusted? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Actual studies and/or personal experiences welcome. Do fire drills, in home and at business, actually prepare people for the real deal? Do they actually cause people to react differently, and better, then if they don’t occur on a regular basis? Is there a difference in reaction, comparing “This is a fire drill, proceed according to instruction” to “Holy shit! There is an earthquake/fire/shooter!”?
At my office, a fire drill is more than just exiting the building. We also have to assemble at a designated area so our manager can do a headcount to ensure everyone got out. So if anything, they’re effective at making sure everyone knows where they’re supposed to assemble after we evacuate.
Not asking if they themselves are effective, though. Do you have a “real thing” example to compare it to?
Well, there was an incident where the fire alarm went off by mistake – there was no actual fire, but it wasn’t a planned “fire drill” either. Everyone reacted pretty much the same way as if it were a drill.
Which tells me that, with no actual danger in sight, the unscheduled drill went well.
I once worked where I was the only contractor from my company in the building. So, the regular employees were counted, but no one bothered to see if I was alive.
I think that’s about all you can ask for.
If the server room caught on fire, the alarm goes off and people start walking out long before it spreads to the exits. The goal is an early alarm, calm people who grab their jacket and head for the door, and everyone is out before 99% of them even know if it’s real. You want them out and counted before the fire trucks arrive.
Since you’re saying “personal experiences welcome” - when I worked in what used to be the old Wang towers in Lowell (I think they were Cross Point then), there was an actual fire. It was small electrical fire on floor undergoing construction, and contained in the room where it started. So it wasn’t an unscheduled drill, but it wasn’t a raging inferno tearing through the building either. But after a few seconds of “Is this a drill?” everyone did what they were supposed to, got their coat, walked down the 12 flights of stairs, and assembled at our companies locations just like we had done in the scheduled drill 2 months earlier. The Fire Dept showed up, confirmed the fire was out and there was no further danger, and we were back in the building within 30 minutes or so. We didn’t find out there was an actual fire until later in the day IIRC.
Curious. How scheduled were those drills? I ask because at the trucking firm I used to work at the employees knew when it was going to happen and acted calmly…but guards, custodians and guests weren’t in the know at all. I would hear the alarm going off and people slowly leaving the main building, but nobody bothered to call me.
Few times a year, we knew about them at least a day in advance, probably more.
That was always the problem where I worked. We had a system where you were supposed to wait for instructions over the PA system, as they’d want to evacuate the directly affected floors first, to minimize traffic jams on the stairs.
During a drill, those instructions always came pretty quickly, within 30 seconds of the alarm sounding. But when something happened for real, the people giving out the information were completely disorganized, taking several minutes to say anything at all, and then only announcing it in French at first. Eventually a lot of us just said to hell with it all, and left the building on our own initiative.
I think it definitely helps in a school with hundreds of kids. They get used to the god-awful sound of our alarm that, in and of itself, could panic them if they weren’t familiarized with the sound. It’s deafening and cuts through your head. They get used to lining up and exiting the building in a very specific way.
Staff is well familiarized with the roles they play. Teachers and paras escort the kids while support personnel, like myself, perform their assigned duties and radio administration when the duties are complete.
Fire drills are only effective if they are treated as a real emergency, and the actual evacuation procedures are both known and enforced every time the drill is conducted.
I teach in a school and we do fire drills monthly. The students are not notified of upcoming drills and, depending on admin’s mood that day, sometimes we aren’t either. Thus the ear-splitting alarm will suddenly go off and we have 90 seconds to evacuate the building and all students and staff are to meet at the flagpole in front of the school. All faculty and staff know the correct procedures and their role in evacuating the building while keeping the students together and following the evacuation plan. The last person out of the building checks the bathrooms and generally makes sure the building is indeed empty. When everyone is out of the building, we do a headcount and verify that all our students are present and accounted for. Only then will we be notified that it was a drill, if indeed it was a drill.
As Jasmine notes these drills help reinforce specific roles assigned to each staff member and cuts down/eliminates potential panic and confusion among the students.
We once had an actual fire in one of the offices and had to evacuate for real. Knowing what to do, where to go, and how to ensure everyone was accounted for in a very quick and timely manner was very important, and the monthly fire drills had prepared us well for that.
We also once had a student pull a fire alarm handle. Again, the building was immediately evacuated, a headcount conducted, and only then did we start tracking down the cause of the alarm.
Students who do not follow the evacuation procedures face swift and quite strict disciplinary action.
So in my workplace, yes they are quite effective.
My wife works in a school that does not have a centralized fire alarm system so each “fire drill” is just a random administrator coming around, announcing it’s a “fire drill” and then the staff start evacuating that particular room. They do not set off the alarm and do not do a school-wide evacuation, so to my way of thinking in a real, actual emergency both the staff and the students would be woefully unprepared.
Yeah, we had a similar thing, you’d get an alarm, a recording “The alarm you just heard was a report of an emergency in this building, please stay where you are and wait for further instructions.” Then they’d go floor by floor “Your floor should now evacuate the building”, which would often take several minutes. The real event wasn’t significantly different than previous drills.
I was in an approximately thirty story office building that evacuated due to a very small electrical fire, and yes, there was a traffic jam on the emergency stairs.
I wonder if the alarm for the fire drill is the same as if there were an actual emergency?
Wouldn’t it have to be? Otherwise, there’s a real fire and no one evacuates because they’ve never heard that noise previously.
In my example it was, there’s nothing to indicate it’s a drill or a real emergency. Though I believe the fire alarm is at least a semitone higher than the burglar alarm.
Except for the fact that people usually knew it was a drill beforehand?
Around ten years ago, at a community college I used to teach at, we had a real active shooter scenario. The alarm and announcements went off, as we were instructed to hunker down in the classroom. Three of the students were Iraq/Afghanistan vets. The classroom had windows all along the hallway side. Without communicating, two of the vets took up positions at either end of the classroom windows, so that between the both of them they could see the entire hallway. The third vet wrangled the rest of us to what they thought was the safest part of the classroom, where we sat and waited, and she and I did our best to keep the rest of the students quiet.
After some time, I don’t recall how long, the all-clear was given. It turned out that at the high school across the street, a student was found with a gun. So both schools were put on lockdown until the situation was sorted out.
If those vets hadn’t been there, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. The funny thing is, there was an active shooter drill scheduled for the next day. The school canceled the drill - it would’ve been pointless after going through the real thing.