The Compactor Smoke and the Man Who Won't Leave
At 0240 the fire alarm activates at a 250,000-square-foot distribution center. You are the only security officer on duty. Forty employees are working. You see light gray smoke coming from under the compactor room door on the east wall. A forklift is parked squarely in front of the east exit, blocking it. One employee in the shipping office says, "I'm not leaving until this load closes out - five minutes." In the break room, a second employee has collapsed beside a table and is not responding. The nearest AED is mounted 40 feet away at the main entrance. The west exit is clear.
1. State your sequence of actions and defend the order.
Read the worked answer
Life safety over property, always - and the alarm going out is priority one.
- Call 911 and state: alarm activated, smoke from compactor room, 40 employees, one unresponsive person, east exit blocked. A fire grows on a curve; the call cannot wait for confirmation.
- Transmit the evacuation over the radio with the specific directive: use the west exit, east exit blocked. Get someone to hold the west door.
- Break room. Unresponsive and not breathing normally = start CPR, send a named person for the AED, have another call out for EMS. Do not abandon CPR to manage the crowd - delegate the evacuation to a supervisor you name by voice.
- Do not fight the fire. Extinguisher use only if you are trained, the fire is small and incipient, and you have a clear exit at your back. Smoke under a door from a compactor room is not an incipient fire.
- Do not move the forklift. If it cannot be moved in seconds by a certified operator, redirect people to the west exit and tell the fire department.
- Accountability at the west muster point: headcount by shift roster, and report missing names to the incident commander.
2. The employee refuses to leave the shipping office. What do you do, and what are the limits?
Read the worked answer
Direct, then escort, then document - never debate.
- Give one clear, specific order: "The building is being evacuated. Leave your station now and go out the west exit." Do not negotiate the five minutes; smoke conditions change faster than that.
- If he still refuses, the emergency creates a narrow justification for reasonable, non-deadly force to move a person out of imminent danger - a hand on the arm, walking him out, two staff if available. What it does not justify is a shoving match, restraints, or a fight in a smoke-filled building.
- If he physically resists, do not wrestle him. Note his name, location, and time; tell the fire department and your supervisor immediately that a person is refusing to evacuate, and clear yourself.
- Never leave a non-evacuating employee to finish a load-out, and never go back inside for him.
- Document: time of the order given, words used, his response, any force used and why, and who witnessed it. Fire marshals and OSHA-facing investigations will ask.
3. Two minutes after the alarm, the employee who said he was not leaving walks out carrying a boxed laptop and says, "I grabbed the shipping laptop so we don't lose the data." What now?
Read the worked answer
Treat him as evacuated, then treat the laptop as evidence of a problem.
- First: he is out, he is safe, and he goes to the muster point. Get him counted and out of the way of arriving apparatus.
- Second: he entered or remained in an evacuation zone contrary to an order and removed property during an emergency. That is a policy and possibly legal issue for management and police to decide - not for you to resolve in the parking lot. Take custody of the laptop, tag it, record the time, and note where it was removed from.
- Third: his action means someone else may also have stayed behind. Re-run the headcount against the shift roster and report any unaccounted names to the incident commander by name, not by guessing.
- Finally, do not let him re-enter for anything else and do not accept his account as the account. The report states what you saw and heard: "At 0246 employee ___ exited the west door carrying a laptop; employee stated he had retrieved it from the shipping office." No adjectives.