The ethics of making it real
Drills and exercises can help prepare people and organizations for the unexpected, but the choices of how to do so may involve tough trade-offs with ethical concerns
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I once had the misfortune of experiencing two fire alarms in the same day. The first one was in the middle of the afternoon, at the office of my then employer in West London. As so often when this happens, the rain was pouring down, and many of us got soaked hurrying from the emergency exit to the assembly point in the car park across the road. Later, I made my way to the Isle of Wight for a client meeting the next day. I was about to get ready for bed when the fire alarm in the small Cowes hotel resounded, and the guests, in various states of dress and undress, proceeded to a corner of the car park — not the most pleasant of places on a cold December night.
In both cases it was a genuine, but false, alarm — at least that is what we were told. I always wondered, though. We have probably all had our share of planned fire drills, in which we get told upfront of the time it will take place — invariably noon, 2pm, or some other conveniently precise whole hour, and never at, say, 3:42pm.
To this date, whenever I hear a fire alarm, I automatically check the time. If it ends on “:00”, I worry a lot less that it might be the real thing — not at all, to be honest. And this relaxed attitude seems to be widely shared during such exercises: nobody appears remotely in a hurry to leave the building. True, the instructions advise us to proceed calmly in case of a fire, but I am not sure they mean the kind of leisurely stroll down the emergency stairs that are typical for fire drills.
So, might devious facilities managers perhaps deliberately engineer ‘malfunctions’ at unexpected times, so they can get a more accurate view of how the building’s occupants would behave in more realistic circumstances? In fact, it is doubtful whether even that would make much difference — most such false alarms tend to be little different from the pre-announced fire drills: the assumption is that it is not a real emergency. No, a facilities manager who genuinely wants to find out how evacuation happens when there is a real fire, should come up with a much more…
