"Businesses will always have a plan in case of a fire"
It probably extends to having fire doors, a designated rendezvous point, extinguishers, evacuating the building, dialling 999 and having a roll-call. Beyond that it's hard to plan, partly because the extent of damage would be unknown.
If a business can't plan for something unknown but physical that the managers can understand, how can it plan for an unknown that most of the business managers don't understand?
I've certainly had the experience of a workplace fire. Any advance planning would have been above my pay grade but I doubt there was any at all. AFAICS the response was improvised based on the actual damage and the circumstances. My wing of the building was burned to a crisp but we needed to be in the security perimeter. The occupants of the surviving wing who didn't need the security were decanted to other premises - how they coped I've no idea. Space allocation had to be based on what was available and what could be found by getting in portacabins.
Individual groups took their own decisions as to what to do - one group gathered their surviving equipment in their allocated space and, as far as I could make out, just sat there for some days waiting to be told what to do next. Personally, I spent part of the Sunday* on the phone to our Leitz contact getting some microscope deliveries prioritised and on the Monday a couple of us drove up to the local laboratory supplier and went round the warehouse with lab. trolleys rather like a supermarket and buying in supplies on the principle that "We'll need some of those and some of that and that one, there". Someone else got in touch with other labs to rebuild the methods notes etc that we'd lost. Each group rearranged their allocated space as best they could with the help of builders brought in to tidy up the gap left by the missing wing. I managed to turn a section of corridor which now went nowhere into a microscope room so successful that we replicated it in the rebuilt wing.
Has anyone else had to deal with the aftermath of a fire and how did it differ in essentials?
* The fire happened on a Friday night and, as I was taking an OU field trip on the Saturday, didn't immediately find out about it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
