Industrial Emergency Personnel: What are the Roles Required?
Industrial Emergency Responders must be prepared to respond to fires of flammable liquid, compressed gases, hazardous material releases, rescues, security breaches, and medical emergencies throughout oil, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, pipeline, mining, and port facilities.
Industrial emergency personnel don’t just respond to emergencies, they become a comprehensive resource to assist in planning and implementing the facility’s health, safety, and environmental protection initiatives.
By training and certifying response personnel in multiple areas, this allows them to switch from one role to another depending upon where they are most needed at a given time. This allows an organization’s management to focus on its core operations with confidence. There are a variety of industrial emergency response functions to be filled to ensure the smooth operation of industrial facilities;
Control Room Personnel
Here personnel oversee the monitoring and assessment of electronic systems such as fire detection, electronic access control, closed-circuit television, alarm systems, and other building systems to deter and protect against all illegal and unauthorized activities. They coordinate dispatch and communications for emergency response, incident management, and organization-wide notifications of incidents. They will oversee the handling of calls received relating to security and emergencies. There is a strict onus on them to ensure the integrity of data recordkeeping, reports, call logs, and other information.
D4H Incident Management’s Control Room interface is specifically designed for control room operators managing multiple high-level incidents. The platform will give an overview of all ongoing incidents and allow you to track information such as their individual location, their status, and situation report. The control room has its own updates log and audit trail, as will each control room incident. Any control room incident can be easily scaled up to a full-scale incident channel should the situation escalate.
Rope Rescue
Rope rescue involves the use of ropes, anchoring and belaying devices, friction rappel devices, various devices to utilize mechanical advantage for hauling systems, and other specialized equipment to reach victims and safely recover them. Three primary categories of rope rescue exist; high angle urban, mountain rescue, and cave rescue. There are significant differences between each in both technique and equipment. As a rule, urban rope rescue involves heavier equipment and is of relatively short duration. Cave and wilderness rope rescue involves lighter equipment with extended rescue times. The nature of the industrial facility e.g. mine, petrochemical, or pharmaceutical will determine which type of rope rescue is required.
Rescue equipment is highly specialized and requires strict maintenance regimes to ensure it’s in proper working order, compliant, and ready for deployment. A solution like D4H Equipment Management will streamline the process of inventory administration with proactive inspections, repairs, expiry dates, and service history logs.
Confined Space Entry
Confined space is a term that refers to an area that is enclosed with limited access, which makes it dangerous. An example is the interior of a storage tank, which responders may enter for a rescue but which is not ordinarily a habitable space. Hazards in a confined space often include suffocation by unbreathable gases which may be present but not visible, submersion in liquids or free-flowing granular solids in grain bins, or electrocution. Often these spaces will have a predetermined rescue plan which incorporates the appropriate safety harness and other rescue equipment.
Investigative Responsibilities
Often emergency personnel will work with their colleagues in Health & Safety to conduct review and analysis of records, data, and surveillance video after a response. They will have responsibility for documenting incident reports. Responders may also make recommendations for investigation activities required after attending incidents to ensure completion of workplace investigations records.
Fire Fighting
Firefighting is the act of extinguishing fires. A firefighter suppresses and extinguishes fires to prevent loss of life, and destruction of property and the environment. One of the major hazards associated with industrial firefighting operations is the toxic environment created by combusting materials.
Emergency Medical Services (EMS)
The goal of most emergency medical services is to either provide treatment to those in need of urgent medical care, with the goal of satisfactorily treating the presenting conditions, or arranging for timely removal of the patient to the next point of definitive care. This is most likely an emergency department at a hospital.
Hazardous Material Response
Hazmat teams are specially trained to handle dangerous goods. Dangerous goods include materials that are radioactive, flammable, explosive, corrosive, oxidizing, asphyxiating, biohazardous, toxic, pathogenic, or allergenic. Also included are physical conditions such as compressed gases and liquids or hot materials, including all goods containing such materials or chemicals, or may have other characteristics that render them hazardous in specific circumstances.
Ensuring Industrial Emergency Response Personnel are Qualified
Industrial Facilities must remain vigilant to the type and amount of risks in their operational area and ensure they’ve trained and qualified personnel. D4H Personnel & Training is a cloud-based system designed to allow industrial organizations to easily manage the administration of response personnel and their qualifications, training, attendance, and availability.
The platform is a full credential management system at your fingertips. Manage your entire training program by building exercises with pre-plans, attached documents, assigned roles, and more. Automatically determine who is missing qualifications based on the expectations for their role. Forecast expiry dates to determine when the next course is required.
