First Three Minutes at Kestrel House
Kestrel House is a three-storey office block with 60 staff inside at 14:05 when the alarm sounds. The only usable exit is the main front door: the rear door has been chained shut since a break-in, and a pallet of printer paper is stacked against it. On the second floor, Priya, a wheelchair user, is waiting beside the protected stair. Her evacuation chair is locked in a first-floor cupboard and the key holder is off site for the day. A trainee suggests using the lift, which is a standard passenger lift. Smoke is reported from the first-floor kitchenette, where a microwave is alight, and an LPG cylinder store stands 20 m from the front entrance. Two delivery vans are parked across the turning circle.
1. Set out your actions for the first three minutes of this incident, in order, and justify why that order beats the obvious alternatives.
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Order I would use:
- Call 999 immediately, before anyone investigates. A false alarm costs a wasted turnout; six minutes of delay costs a room, a floor or a life. The control room can always stop a response, but it cannot recover lost minutes.
- Evacuate through the front door only, with a named person controlling the door and stopping re-entry.
- Account for 60 staff at the assembly point away from the cylinder store, and report the missing person to the fire service on arrival.
- Meet the appliance with the facts: microwave fire, first-floor kitchenette, LPG store 20 m from the entrance, rear door chained, one person still on floor two.
Why not investigate first: a single person walking towards a kitchenette fire next to a cylinder store adds a casualty and loses the early call. Why not the lift: a standard passenger lift is not a fire-fighting lift; it can stop at the fire floor or fail on power changeover. Why not the rear door: it is chained and blocked, so treating the front door as the sole route is a fact to manage, not a hope.
2. Priya is on the second floor and the evacuation chair is inaccessible. Compare the realistic options and state what you would actually do, with the conditions attached.
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Option A - lift. Rejected. Not a fire-fighting lift, no control, possible power isolation, and smoke in the shaft is a real risk. A trainee's suggestion is understandable but wrong.
Option B - immediate assisted carry down the stair. Viable only if the stair is clear of smoke, two trained people are available, and Priya agrees. Untrained carrying of a person plus chair on a stair is how secondary casualties happen; a controlled two-person carry with the chair left behind is safer than a three-person lift.
Option C - protected refuge with supervision. Keep her in the stair enclosure or designated refuge, one named person staying with her, door closed, and pass the exact location to the fire service on arrival.
My decision: check the stair - if it is clear, carry her down now with two trained staff and a third clearing ahead; smoke on the stair changes the balance and a supervised refuge becomes the better option. Either way I tell the fire service the location in my first message and I do not leave her unaccompanied.
3. After the incident, what do you record and what do you change first? Explain how you handle the trainee and the chained rear door without turning the debrief into a blame exercise.
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Record: time of alarm, time of call, evacuation time and headcount time, the missing person's location and how she was moved, the state of both exits, the alarm log, any equipment failure, and the decisions taken with reasons. Facts and times, not opinions.
Change first, in this order: (1) rear door - remove the chain and the pallet today and add the route to the daily check; (2) evacuation chair - relocate it to the floor where the person at risk works and move the key to a break-glass point; (3) a personal emergency evacuation plan for Priya, agreed with her, not written about her.
The trainee: praising the fact he spoke up while correcting the lift suggestion keeps reporting honest. A blame-first debrief teaches people to stay quiet next time, which is a far bigger risk than one wrong suggestion. The chained door is a management failure, not an individual's, and the record should say so plainly.