Incident Report

 

Site Mustering Sasol Synfuel

Initial Email Enquiry –

Please can the membership assist a representative from Texaco with information relating to accounting for personnel during site fire alarms. Reply to all please.

1st Response –

Hello Kevin, we are looking to improve our site mustering procedure. At the moment the site personnel muster outside when the site alarm sounds, and then a paper exercise follows making sure everyone is accounted for. Can you please help with information as to what other companies do when they need to muster large groups of personnel. Do they muster inside or out and have they got a paper or electronic register.

2nd Response –

At our Secunda site we shelter outside buildings for fire and bomb threat scenarios.

However for gas/toxic release scenarios (toxic- mainly ammonia) we shelter inside buildings using the design of 1m² per person in high integrity Emergency Assembly Points (EAP’s) We warn employees, contractors, visitors and suppliers on site by using a combination of the on site sirens (Federal Signal DC2001) and a PA announcement from our Central Control Room (CCR).
Effectiveness is determined by:

  1. Hardware design – sirens
  2. Education before emergencies
  3. Information during emergencies

All people on site then shelter and do roll call, mainly a paper exercise, and when all in a specific building at that moment are accounted for, the Building Emergency Controller phones in to the Communicator (www.dccusa.com) with a PIN nr to confirm that the building safely sheltered. If problems are experienced, like medical emergencies etc, the Emergency Management Control room at the Fire Station is phoned to request immediate assistence, which will be sent if the relevant building is outside the affected area.

The Communicator (Word doc.) will capture the info of all EAP’s and in the Works Emergency Centre the Planning section will compare the received calls (right ticks) with the relevant map grid of the possible affected area. If any X’s are found inside the relevant grid’s, the Planning guy will follow up by phoning that specific EAP – the PIN is the EAP tel nr. If no response, he has the option to ask CCR to make contact via the PA or via the Plant Control room. We are still finalising our grid system which only works if people use it. As all EAP’s have not completed the Communicator roll-out, we still receive some phone calls as well.

The previous method was for all EAP’s to phone in to the Works Emergency Centre, but that caused a telephone and systems overload and not really being able to close the loop on who sheltered safely.

I know some of our Middle Eastern colleagues use access control readers to overcome language barriers etc.

Hope this info helps


End of email correspondence on Topic to date.

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