My work has gone fire safety crazy recently. I’m one of the few people on my floor who’s usually at their desk rather than in the lab or off doing whatever it is that PIs do when they’re not in their offices, so I get to be a floor warden! Yay! Lucky me. We’ve had all kinds of videos and lectures and I’ve been given a lovely red hard hat, with an attractive orange vest on the way. It might be worth it though; there’s a rumour that our next training will resemble the standard method my PhD institute used in Glasgow, i.e. going out to the parking lot and setting fire to bins full of paper and big trays of petrol, and learning how to put them out.
\nWe had a full building evacuation fire drill yesterday. It went remarkably smoothly; we got out and declared our floor “clear” to the head honcho within about three minutes. It helped that they’d given everyone lots of warning about a 10.30 fire drill, and that most people went for coffee at 10.25. (They missed out on the free candy the safety team handed out though, so who are the smart ones, eh?)
\nAt the debriefing, we were told that the next drill will be unannounced (that’ll go down well with people doing tissue culture and animal work). Not only that, but they’ll enlist students as actors who will pretend to sprain an ankle on the stairs, or to pass out behind a filing cabinet or in another inaccessible location.
\nMy first thought was that our next drill might resemble this classic clip from the US version of The Office:<\/p>\n
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But actually, all previous evacuations (in our institution’s old building – two storeys rather than the current fifteen) went very well indeed. We had two chemical spills within about six months, and both times everyone proceeded calmly to the exits with My work has gone fire safety crazy recently. I’m one of the few people on my floor who’s usually at their desk rather than in the lab or off doing whatever it is that PIs do when they’re not in … Continue reading a minimum of<\/del> absolutely no running, stampeding, trampling, or screaming. It took forever for the HazMat team to give us the all-clear, but luckily enough people had coffee money with them that we didn’t suffer unduly.
\nWe responded to our only actual fire a little too<\/em> calmly. I came out of the office area at about 6.30 pm one evening to find a blue haze in the corridor. As I was wondering what it was, a PI came out of the nearest door saying “I think my lab might be on fire”. I told him I thought he might be right. He said he’d go and see who else was in the lab area, and could I please go and tell everyone in the office that they might want to leave?
\nI trotted off obediently and had already advised two people to leave before I thought of pulling the fire alarm (one of the students beat me to it, which was quite disappointing actually). There were very few people around, and we stood outside laughing at ourselves as we waited for the firemen. The blaze turned out to be a self-contained, self-limiting electrical fire that was probably already out by the time we noticed it.
\nBut those scary videos they keep showing us of a Christmas tree light turning a whole room into an inferno within a couple of minutes make me think that I might respond a little more urgently next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"