By Gary E. Wilson, President & Designated Broker, Wilson Management, Inc.
An emergency plan is only worth what the person on site tonight can execute from it. Most commercial buildings have a document; considerably fewer have one that is current, findable, and known by anyone who would need it.
The test is unglamorous and it is the whole exercise: could the person on duty right now find the plan, reach the right people, and locate the equipment it refers to? If any of those is uncertain, the plan is a compliance artefact rather than a capability.
The scenarios worth planning for
Fire and evacuation. The most regulated and the most rehearsed. What matters operationally is that assembly points are actually usable — a parking lot assembly point that emergency vehicles need to access is not a good assembly point — and that tenants know theirs.
Water intrusion. More common than fire and frequently more damaging in a commercial building, because water reaches tenant property, finishes and equipment. Roof failures, burst supply lines, failed sprinkler components and blocked drains all produce it.
Power failure. Closes tenants. Emergency lighting must function, and the building needs a documented position on access control when the system is down, lift entrapment, and how tenants are told what is happening.
Earthquake. A genuine regional exposure. Post-event, the questions are structural assessment before reoccupation, utility isolation, and how the building communicates when normal channels are down.
Severe weather. Windstorms with forecast lead time, which makes preparation possible in a way most emergencies do not allow.
Medical emergencies and security incidents, including the procedure for lockdown or evacuation.
This article is general information, not legal or safety advice.
What every scenario needs
Each plan entry should answer the same short set of questions:
- Who does what, by role rather than by name
- How tenants are notified, and through which channel
- Where people go, if evacuation is involved
- Who contacts emergency services, and who meets them on arrival
- What gets shut off, and where those controls are
- Who authorises decisions when the usual person is unreachable
Roles rather than names is deliberate. Staff change, and a plan naming an individual who left eighteen months ago is a plan that does not work.
Contact currency is the failure point
The element that decays fastest and matters most is the contact list.
Tenant emergency contacts change as their staff change. A list assembled at lease signing is out of date within a year, and it is discovered to be out of date at exactly the wrong moment.
Refresh annually. Tenant emergency contacts, after-hours numbers for each trade, the fire authority's non-emergency line, the insurer's claims line, utility emergency numbers, and internal escalation contacts. It is administrative work that nobody enjoys and it is what makes the difference between a plan and a document.
Worth capturing for each tenant: who to call after hours, how many people they typically have in the space, whether anyone works unusual hours, and whether they hold anything requiring special handling — chemicals, controlled substances, server rooms with their own suppression.
Tenant coordination
Emergency preparedness in a multi-tenant building is a shared responsibility, and the boundary is worth stating plainly.
The landlord covers base building systems, common areas, evacuation routes and assembly points, and building-wide notification.
The tenant covers what happens inside their premises — their own evacuation procedure, their floor wardens if they have them, their staff awareness, and anything specific to their operation.
Being explicit prevents the common failure where both sides assume the other has it covered. Tenants also need to know the building's procedures, which means telling them at fit-out rather than assuming they read the lease.
Utility shut-offs
A surprising number of buildings cannot answer this quickly: where is the main water shut-off, the gas shut-off, and the main electrical disconnect?
They should be documented, labeled, accessible without moving stored material, and known to whoever is on site. In a water intrusion event, getting the supply off is usually worth more than getting a contractor quickly — water running for six hours is a different event from water running for twenty minutes.
Preparing before a forecast event
Windstorms come with lead time, which makes them the one scenario where preparation genuinely prevents damage:
- Notify tenants with enough warning to act
- Secure or remove loose material from the roof, the site and any balconies
- Check roof drains and site drainage are clear
- Confirm emergency lighting and any generator are functional
- Confirm contact lists are current
- Ensure emergency equipment is accessible
Testing the plan without a drill
Full evacuation drills are valuable and infrequent. Between them, several cheap tests reveal whether a plan is real.
The findability test. Ask whoever is on site to produce the emergency plan. If it takes more than a minute, or it is only on a computer nobody can log into, the plan does not exist for practical purposes.
The phone test. Pick five numbers from the contact list at random and call them during business hours. In most buildings that have not refreshed the list recently, at least one is wrong.
The equipment test. Walk to where the plan says the emergency equipment is. Frequently it has been moved, is behind stored material, or is in a locked room whose key is elsewhere.
The shut-off test. Ask someone on site to point to the main water shut-off. This one fails more often than any other.
The after-hours test. Call your own emergency line outside business hours and see what happens.
None of these take more than an hour in total, and each one that fails is a failure that would otherwise have been discovered during an actual incident.
The first hour
What happens immediately determines what an incident costs.
- Life safety first — evacuate or shelter as the situation requires
- Stop the source where it can be done safely — water off, power isolated
- Notify emergency services where required, and meet them
- Notify affected tenants
- Document — photographs before anything is moved, times, what was found and done
- Notify insurers promptly
- Assess before reoccupation, particularly after structural events
Documentation is the step most often compressed under pressure and the one that cannot be recreated. Photographs before anything is disturbed are worth more than any written account produced later.
Afterwards
Review honestly. Nearly every incident exposes something — equipment in the wrong place, a number that had changed, a procedure nobody actually knew, or an assumption that did not hold.
Capturing that while it is fresh is what makes the next event less costly. A plan that is updated after each incident becomes genuinely useful within a couple of years; one that is written once and filed does not.
Insurance and the claim
Preparation determines the response; documentation determines the claim.
Know before an incident what the policy covers, what the deductible is, what the notification requirements and timeframes are, and who to call. Reading a policy for the first time during an incident is a poor way to discover its limits.
At the time of the event, the items that matter are photographs taken before anything is moved, a written note of times and sequence, records of what was done and by whom, and preserved evidence of the cause where it can be identified. Insurers assess what they are shown, and an account reconstructed from memory a week later is worth considerably less than images taken in the first hour.
Where tenant property is affected, their insurance and yours will both be involved, which makes it worth knowing in advance what your leases require tenants to carry — and whether those certificates are current.
Where to go next## Where to go next
Our Commercial Building Maintenance page covers the preventive work that prevents many of these events, and Vendor Management covers arranging emergency coverage before you need it rather than during an incident.
For the full service, see Commercial Property Management, or contact us.
About the author
Gary E. Wilson is the President and Designated Broker of Wilson Management, Inc., which he has led in serving property owners across Bellevue and the Greater Seattle area since 1982. With more than 40 years of hands-on experience, Gary helps owners protect and maximize the value of single-family, multi-family, and commercial properties.
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