Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by George on October 26, 2011 at 3:34am

What I did in our city was send the business's a form to fill out and either picked them up, mail back or had them leave them at the city hall. There was about a 35% response back out of about 100 which was better than I expected.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Moose on October 26, 2011 at 8:38am

I would do like George said before I would hire any outside agency to do our pre-plans.  No one knows our operations better than us, and to have an outside agency come in and do an Important thing as pre-plan the district is a LODD waiting to happen. 

We are a small department also, about 26 active members with only 9 interiors.  We have our pre-planning done each year with the fire prevention week.  We send out letters with info on fire safety, and a quick questionaire about a business and their fire protection features such as sprinklers.  We ask for a floor plan and information about who to contact should we respond to a call to their business after hours.  We get a great response, bottom line is; if people want us to protect their property we need to know key pieces of info.

We got some negative comments about the floor plans, including "Why, so you know where to find the valuables when you rob the place?!"  After carefully explaining to the owners that the more we know about the layout of the builidng the quicker we can rescue people and extinguish the fire they understood. 

Take a drill night also, load everyone in the rescue truck (or whatever is available) and drive through your district, look for obvious hazards and than stop and talk about the building, see if you can talk to the owner while there and ask to take pictures and have a tour.  Most of the time they say yes, I have never had someone say no to us and we have learned a lot that way about our district.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Marc Hansen on October 29, 2011 at 10:25am

Send out letters to all of the business in you area asking if you could do a walk thru on your drill nite. Explain to the owners that this is so you have an idea of the layout...etc in the event of an emergency occuring at their place. When you go have one or two members taking notes and make sure to ask lots of questions. If you have medical facilities ask where patient records are kept, O2 cylinders and the like. With the records it helps in business recovery if you are able to salvage them. By doing this once or twice a month you can get most of your members involved without anyone trying to find extra time to get it done

• ▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion