White Powder Envelopes; A focus on CBRNE Awareness in High-Rise Buildings
An unprepared workplace can be impacted for several hours, often negatively impacting the entire building. However, a prepared tenant workplace and a prepared building management team, for such CBRNE events, can limit this impact - and significantly reduce the risk to public safety prior to the arrival of emergency services.
"At risk" employees such as administrative assistants, mailroom personnel, and security staff should have an awareness level of hazards and their risks to effectively deal with suspicious packages, "white powder envelopes,” and associated hazardous materials.
These employees are often the first point of contact and the actions of staff in the first five minutes of a hazardous materials incident will ultimately determine the safety impact and length of lost time due to a C.B.R.N.E incident.
While these events remain an easy, cost effective delivery of threat, their impact over the last ten years has been significant on disturbing a workplace and their respective operations.
Prepared “at risk” workplace staff that provide for early recognition, isolation and communication of these threats, can also see that prepared building management staff play a role in the reaction of both planning and response. Prepared building owners and managers responding with isolating building air intakes during these incidents can further assist in the workplace response. The preparedness is a true partnership between the tenant and building owner.
Despite the obvious safety benefits in improving response to these threats, let’s talk about what motivates the C Suite to better prepare their workplace - costs. With upgraded preparation within your staff and property management teams, you can significantly reduce the amount of downtime these incidents always cause. Reducing an incident impact by two hours will get you back to serving your customer faster.
Quite simply, if your organization is unprepared to receive and respond to these threats then the impact will be greater. “At risk” staff should be trained to “do the right things” prior to the arrival of emergency responders to effectively, and safely, react to any CBRNE issues that they may encounter.
If you need any help, please let us know. National Life Safety Group
NLS Group is a team of facility fire safety and workplace crisis management experts established to ensure greater public safety. We uniquely achieve this by utilizing leadership and experience from both the private, and public sector, utilizing the principles of emergency management in everyday business and facility operations.
www.nationallifesafetygroup.ca