8.4 Emergency Preparedness
Emergencies are sudden events that pose a hazard to workers’ health and safety and require immediate action. Obvious examples include weather or transportation events such as the 2013 flood in Calgary, Alberta, or the tanker-car explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Fortunately, most emergencies are of a much smaller scale. The release of hazardous gases at the Burnaby mushroom farm is an example. The workers had no warning that they would be exposed to a powerful chemical hazard in a confined space, and the exposure rapidly incapacitated, injured, and killed them. While preventing such events is ideal, emergency plans can significantly mitigate the harm caused by emergencies.[1]
Like all HRAC activities, emergency planning begins by evaluating what hazards might trigger an emergency in the workplace. Emergencies can be caused by hazards specific to the workplace (e.g., a leak of dangerous chemicals in a hardware store) or by events outside the workplace (e.g., the risk of retail workers becoming ill during an outbreak of the flu). Once the most likely causes of an emergency at a workplace have been identified, it is necessary to consider how each cause would affect the workplace and how the underlying hazards can be controlled.
This process can lead to the development of one or more emergency plans that outline the steps necessary to respond effectively to the emergency. The details of these plans will differ based upon the nature of the hazard: a chemical spill obviously requires a different set of responses than a pandemic.
There are three major phases to any emergency plan:
- Activation: It is necessary for someone to recognize that an emergency is occurring, activate the emergency plan, and communicate the emergency to workers and any relevant authorities or other affected persons. An activation protocol may identify the circumstances that create an emergency (e.g., triggering events or circumstances) and the steps to commence the emergency response.
- Evacuation, rescue, or shelter: Emergencies may require the evacuation of some or all workers. Evacuation routes (including alternative routes), muster points, and a means of determining whether an evacuation is complete are important components of an emergency plan. Depending upon the circumstances, an evacuation plan may also direct the shutdown of certain work processes and the treatment or further evacuation of injured workers. Some hazards—such as chemical hazards in confined spaces—may require specialized rescue skills or equipment in order to evacuate workers before further harm occurs. Other hazards—such as extreme weather—may require workers to take shelter on site.
- Ongoing management: A protocol for managing an ongoing emergency is helpful once the initial phase of the emergency has passed. While we tend to think of emergencies as single dramatic events, an emergency may entail an ongoing set of events such as the pandemic discussed in Box 8.5. Ongoing management might include plans to secure equipment and information, ensuring there is a means of communicating with staff and for staff to communicate with their families, a media relations plan, the provision of assistance to help employees cope with their reactions to the event, and a business-resumption plan.
Emergency planning can be much more complicated when the worksite changes frequently (e.g., in construction) or is mobile (e.g., in oil-and-gas exploration). Knowing there is an emergency and developing evacuation protocols is much more difficult when facing constantly shifting circumstances.
Emergency planning is linked to safety training because all workers need to know what to do and where to go in the event of an emergency. Emergency responders (people assigned to respond to the emergency) require additional levels of training to spot hazards and engage an effective response (e.g., evacuate injured workers, stop a gas leak). Part of emergency preparedness is a comprehensive training plan for each worker at the level they require it.
OHS implications of pandemics
A pandemic is the sudden outbreak of a disease that affects a large portion of the population due to a lack of natural immunity. A pandemic has significant implications for OHS, particularly in the health-care and service sectors. Not only can workers contract the illness in their workplace, but a widespread pandemic can create new hazards. For example, staff may need to perform tasks they are unfamiliar with or untrained for as other workers fail to report due to illness, fear, or being required to care for others.
Thinking a bit more broadly, equipment and materials may become scarce due to demand or logistics problems. Utilities (e.g., water, power) may be also become unreliable due to high levels of worker absenteeism. Quarantine procedures might significantly affect the availability of workers, while high demand might limit access to emergency and medical services. Such issues may create a series of cascading OHS hazards in the workplace.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) provides a useful case study. In late 2002, a patient in China’s Guangdong province fell ill with an atypical case of pneumonia. Additional cases appeared in the following months, and the disease was spread to Hong Kong by a health-care worker who attended a family wedding in February 2003. One of the dozen people affected in Hong Kong was a 78-year-old woman who returned home to Toronto, Ontario, and became the Canadian index case (the first case that indicates the existence of an outbreak).
The woman died and a family member who provided care for her was hospitalized, resulting in the disease spreading to other patients and staff. In the end, there were up to six generations of disease transmission, and health-care workers comprised 43% of those who fell ill with SARS. There were 44 SARS-related deaths in Canada and over 400 people became ill, while 25,000 people were quarantined.[2] Globally, the death toll was 916, approximately 11% of all who fell ill with SARS.
This emergency required significant changes to normal patient-handling protocols in the health-care system. Despite enacting emergency protocols to contain the pandemic, some workers who fell ill with SARS also experienced long-term physical health consequences as a result of the disease (or its treatment). Others, including health-care workers, experienced post-traumatic stress. The SARS experience resulted in the widespread introduction of pandemic plans in the Canadian public sector. Comprehensive data is lacking, but practitioners estimate that fewer than 10% of private-sector organizations have pandemic plans.
A sudden event that poses a hazard to workers’ health and safety and requires immediate action.
A sudden outbreak of disease that is widespread and affects a large portion of the world due to a susceptible population, often with a high mortality rate
The first case that indicates the outbreak of a disease.
