Our last fire drill was garbage. Here’s what changed after we got serious.
I used to think fire drills were theater. Announce the drill two days out. Post flyers. Do it at 10 AM on a Tuesday so we don't interrupt lunch. Everyone strolls out. We check the NFPA 101 box. Done.
Then we had a real incident last October — not a fire, a bomb threat — and my certainty that "we know how to evacuate this building" evaporated in about 90 seconds.
Here's what I learned, and what our drills look like now.
What the announced drill hid
- Three elevators were used during the "evacuation." They're labeled. Nobody cared in the moment.
- Two stair doors were propped open with fire extinguishers. Literally.
- Accountability at the assembly point took 28 minutes. Not because people were missing — because *nobody had a current tenant list*. We had a 2023 list.
- Two floors had new tenants that had never been briefed on assembly point location. They followed the crowd. It worked, but by luck.
What we changed
Drills are now unannounced. Building management + the fire life safety director know. No one else. Fire Department coordinates so no false 911.
Stair obstruction is a pre-drill walk. Every quarter I walk every stair, top to bottom, day of. If I find a propped door or stored item, I photograph it before anyone moves it. The photos go on the drill report.
Tenant roster is updated the 1st of every month. Lobby security has a printout. Assembly-point monitors have a printout. The electronic list is a backup, not the source of truth.
We added a "Phase 2" drill twice a year. After the main evacuation, 10% of the population is told to play the role of a person with a mobility limitation stuck on a floor. They wait in the stairwell Area of Refuge. We time how long until someone checks.
The first Phase 2 drill, the answer was 41 minutes. Nobody checked. We had to dispatch someone from the assembly point because a security camera showed "people waiting in the stairwell."
Second Phase 2, it was 11 minutes — a tenant monitor did a stair sweep on their way down.
Third, we had dedicated stair-sweep roles. 4 minutes.
The mindset shift
"Practice like it's real" sounds cliché until you've had a real event that made clear how unreal your practices were. Every single thing we drill now has a question attached: *if this were the real moment, would this detail matter?* If yes, we don't get to skip it.
The OSHA EAP regulation (29 CFR 1910.38) is the floor. NFPA 101 frequency requirements are the floor. The floor doesn't save lives. The ceiling does.