The 7 Questions to Answer Before Building an Emergency Management Plan

“Just tell us how many staff you’ve got and what industry you’re in. We’ll have a plan back to you by Friday.”

 

That’s not planning. That’s guessing with a cover page. An emergency plan built on three or four facts about a business can only ever describe three or four facts’ worth of emergency response. Everything else in it is filled in from a template, and a template doesn’t know where your gas shut-off is, whether your night-shift worker can raise anyone if something goes wrong, or that your loading dock shares a fence line with a business that stores chemicals.

 

The quality of an emergency plan is set before a single word of it is written. It’s set by the questions someone asked, or didn’t ask, about the actual site.

 

The short answer: a stronger emergency management plan starts with better questions about the real site, not a faster draft. Get the discovery step wrong, and the plan built on it is a guess with a cover page.

 

Why the questions matter more than the drafting

 

An emergency plan under the Work Health and Safety Regulations 2012 (SA), consistent with the model WHS Regulations used nationally, has to provide for an effective response, evacuation procedures, notifying emergency services, medical treatment, communication during the response, testing, and training. Every one of those elements depends on facts specific to the site. You can’t design an “effective response” without knowing what the credible emergencies actually are, and you can’t identify credible emergencies without a proper risk assessment of what’s stored on site, who’s on it, when, and what’s next door.

 

AS 3745:2010, Planning for emergencies in facilities (the standard most Australian workplaces use to meet that duty) builds its whole process around this: an emergency planning committee (EPC) gathers site-specific information before it identifies credible emergencies or writes a single response procedure. Skip that gathering step, or do it in five minutes over the phone, and everything built on top of it inherits the gap. This is the same failure that shows up later as a generic, copy-paste plan. The point here is to stop it happening in the first place, by asking better questions before the plan exists.

 

The questions to ask before you start

 

Fourteen questions matter most, grouped into four areas.

 

The site and how it operates

 

• Site: building type, number of floors, construction, fire compartmentation, exits, and where an assembly area is actually viable, not just where it’s convenient to draw one.
• Occupancy: normal headcount and how it changes: functions, peak trading periods, seasonal staff, tenants sharing the building.
• Operating hours: single shift, extended hours, or genuinely 24/7. A plan written around a 9-to-5 office is not a plan for the security guard doing a solo 2am round.
• Neighbouring sites: shared boundaries, shared access, and whether a neighbouring business’s risk (a fuel depot, a manufacturing plant, another employer’s hazardous chemicals) becomes yours by proximity.

 

One product of this section deserves its own mention. What comes out of it should be an evacuation diagram, not a map. A map shows the building. An evacuation diagram has to show a direct route out from wherever someone actually is on the floor, not just the route from the front door, or from the one spot someone happened to be standing when they drew it. It’s worth checking now: does the diagram on your wall show a way out from every point on that floor, or only from the spot nearest where it’s pinned up? An evacuation diagram is one piece of an emergency management plan, not the whole thing, but it still has to be a correct piece, not a rough sketch of the floor.

 

The people who need to be accounted for

 

• Workers: numbers, roles, shift patterns, and anyone working alone or in an isolated part of the site.
• Visitors: how often they’re on site, whether they’re inducted or signed in, and how a visitor with no site knowledge would know what to do or where to go.
• Contractors: how frequently they’re on site, whether they operate under your induction and control or their own, and whether high-risk work (hot work, isolations, confined space entry) changes what a credible emergency looks like on a given day.
• Vulnerable occupants: anyone who can’t self-evacuate unaided, whether that’s mobility, vision or hearing impairment, or simply someone unfamiliar with the building. This has to be a named, current arrangement, not an assumption that “someone will help.”

 

What could actually go wrong

 

• Hazardous substances: what’s stored, in what quantity, and whether the site approaches a manifest quantity threshold that changes the regulatory picture. This isn’t limited to the static register: chemicals a contractor brings in for a job, or that arrive on a delivery, count too, and a plan that only reflects what’s permanently on site misses them. Location and access to safety data sheets matters as much as the chemical itself.
• Plant: machinery, lifts, cranes or processes that need to be shut down or isolated as part of a safe response, not just left running while everyone leaves.
• Utilities: where gas, power and water shut-offs actually are, who’s trained to operate them, and whether there’s backup power for anything safety-critical.
• Previous incidents: near misses, past evacuations, false-alarm fatigue, and anything an earlier drill flagged but never got fixed. Plans that ignore history repeat it.

 

Getting emergency services there and in

 

• Remote or hard-to-reach areas: basements, roofs, yards, paddocks or outbuildings without mobile coverage or where an alarm can’t be heard.
• Emergency-service access: gate codes, height or width restrictions, hydrant and booster locations, after-hours access arrangements, and whether anyone on site actually knows this information or it’s only on a drawing in a filing cabinet.

 

Fourteen categories, four groups, one purpose: a plan can only respond to what the planning process actually knew about.

 

These are headings, not the finished assessment. Every one still has to be worked through in detail for the specific site: the actual chemicals, the actual neighbours, the actual layout, not ticked off as answered because the category came up in conversation. And once the plan is built around those specifics, the whole program still has to be stress-tested through exercises, more than once a year, and across the different emergency types that are actually credible for that business, not a single evacuation drill treated as proof the whole plan works. A site with hazardous chemicals needs a spill response tested, not just an evacuation; a site with after-hours lone workers needs a lockdown or medical response tested too. A heading with a generic answer sitting underneath it is exactly what a template produces, the opposite of what this discovery step is for.

 

What only a site visit can tell you

 

A written questionnaire is a starting point, not a finish line. Some of the most consequential gaps only show up when someone actually walks the site.

 

• Whether the marked exit is real, or blocked by stock, a locked gate, or a fire door propped open for airflow.
• Real travel distance and sightlines to the assembly area, not what looks fine on a floor plan.
• Whether the shut-offs match what’s documented, and whether they’re actually accessible or buried behind stored equipment.
• Mobile signal and alarm audibility in the remote or noisy parts of the site the form only listed as a line item.
• Whether the gate an emergency vehicle needs is wide enough, and whether the code to open it after hours is current.
• Whether the arrangement for a vulnerable occupant (an evacuation chair, a buddy system) actually works in practice, and whether the people nearby know it exists.
• Whether a chemical a contractor carried in this week shows up anywhere in the plan, or only what was on site the day it was written.
• Whether anyone on site has actually been trained on this specific plan, or only sat through a generic induction video that never mentioned the building they work in.

 

This is a pattern the WLSS team sees regularly. A mid-sized logistics business had an emergency plan on file, produced from a questionnaire completed by head office. On paper, the site looked covered: exits marked, an assembly point nominated, contacts listed. The site visit told a different story. The assembly point sat directly in the path a forklift used to move stock between two sheds. A locked gate meant the loading dock’s night-shift worker had no clear route to it at all. A drum of chemicals delivered weekly by a contractor never appeared on the hazardous substances register, because the register only reflected what head office had been told was stored permanently. None of that showed up until someone walked the site and checked the plan against what was actually there.

 

None of that comes from a questionnaire answered at a desk. It comes from someone standing in the building, checking what’s written against what’s true.

 

 

Frequently asked questions

 

 

Where WLSS fits

 

The WLSS team runs this emergency planning discovery process as a site visit, not a form emailed back and forth, because the answers that matter most are the ones you can only get by looking. The plan gets built around what’s actually found: the real exits, the real hazards, the real gaps in after-hours coverage, in writing, every time.

 

That’s also why the process doesn’t stop at a signed-off document. WLSS recommends its own trained advisers come on site to run that testing in person, more than once a year and across the different emergency types relevant to that business, not one evacuation drill standing in for every credible scenario. The same advisers work directly with the site’s EPC, which has to actually be built and populated on site, not appointed on paper, so the people on it understand what they’re responsible for before an exercise puts it to the test. Once the plan and the committee have both been tested, the people on site get trained specifically on how it runs in their environment, matched to their roles, their layout, their risks, not a generic slide deck. A plan nobody’s been trained on is still just paperwork. It’s the same standard WLSS applies across its broader WHS compliance services, not just emergency planning.

 

Next time someone hands over an emergency plan, ask what questions they asked before they wrote it, how many different emergency types it’s actually been tested against, whether the EPC understands its own responsibilities, and who’s been trained on it. If the honest answer to any of those is “not really,” the plan describes a building that isn’t quite yours.

 

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