Emergency action plans are a federal requirement and are an absolute necessity within any OSHA regulated facility. No one can predict when a hazardous situation may occur and very few will know exactly what to do during a true emergency.
The plans, when implemented during an emergency, can dramatically reduce injury to workers on site and cover everything from the conditions that would trigger an actual evacuation to the procedures dedicated to helping people egress the facility.
Until recently, a variety of industries — from the industrial sector to oil, gas and mining — have relied primarily on well developed, manual processes to ensure workers have properly evacuated to a predetermined muster location. They rely on air horns or expensive custom alarm systems to alert workers to evacuate to the muster location. Superintendents may lean on paper attendance sheets to check off that workers are all gathered in the right place.
Manual processes, however, are hardly efficient, effective, or safe in the most unexpected emergencies. If lines of communication are down and workers are missing from their muster location, safety personnel may need to reenter danger zones to search for those unaccounted workers – risking their safety, health and possibly their life in the process.
However, thanks to wearable technology, it’s possible to automate the evacuation process across even the biggest mines, oil and gas facilities or industrial plants and better ensure that all workers are out of harm’s way. At Triax, we’ve been helping our customers achieve just this for several years.
Using the Spot-r Mesh dashboard, our customers can enable automated evacuation alarms using either our EvacTags or Spot-r Clips, which workers wear. Here’s how it works:
- Once supervisors have enabled the alarm via the dashboard, EvacTags and Spot-r Clips emit alarms and LED lighting to notify workers the need to move to their muster locations.
- As workers get out of harm’s way, the system collects and transmits real-time headcounts and locations of each worker on site. Supervisors can follow the updates to monitor their locations and ensure all workers are safe.
- If workers haven’t made it to the muster location, the dashboard will provide the floor and zone-based locations of each unaccounted worker. In the case of a catastrophic emergency, the system will provide the best last location of individuals, so rescue teams have a starting point when searching for them.
What’s more, our system stands up in hazardous work environments where flammable vapors, gasses or particles are in the air, for example. Spot-r has intrinsically safe versions of the equipment that have gone through a rigorous engineering and certification process to ensure they meet global standards.
The system has crucial benefits:
Safety – By implementing Spot-r Evac, clients have reduced their evacuation times by as much as 72%, and that means more people are getting out of harm’s way more quickly and efficiently.
Insurance – Speedier evacuation times can reduce a work site’s risks, potentially helping to reduce insurance costs.
Insights – Supervisors can analyze data collected from evacuation drills as well as data collected post-emergency within the Spot-r Mesh dashboard. This data can offer insight for individuals or teams that may need additional safety training to improve their evacuation times and identify bottlenecks in the facility causing delays.
Are you ready to automate evacuations and make your work place safer? Contact us to learn more.
