For more than eight years, I have been involved in buildings based security where critical assets including people and information need to be protected from all possible threats including bombs explosion, fire, and other emergency situations.
   I was specifically involved in a countermeasure response plan that addressed these threats situations and adopted the appropriate security policies and procedures to prevent the threatening risk from happening or at least reduce its impact if it did happen.   It is important to keep in mind that the risk is always measured by evaluating the threats and vulnerabilities comparing to the action taken to prevent the risk from happening.
   Part of our plan was concern with first responders’ team and things every member should do in case of an emergency.  The most important element of any emergency plan is the periodical testing so every person knows his rule, where to go and what to do if the plan was to be carried out. There were a lot of issues to be considered in great details before the final plan was approved. Some of these issues are: the number of emergency exits in the buildings, the number of people that may need help to evacuate the building in case of emergency and their locations in the building. Keeping in mind these issues, every security team member was assigned to one of these people who may need help during an emergency. For example, if security team has to evacuate employees from the building, they already knew in advance what team member would evacuate the first floor, what team member would evacuate the second floor and so forth. These kind of planning will safe time, prevent confusion and reduce losses during emergency situations.
Also many of our plan components were based on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards for safety and security and buildings code. As part of our plan, we had required that all members of our security team obtain training and Red Cross certification in basic CPR and first aid help in addition to the security training to be well prepared to respond to a broad variety of life-threatening situations including some medical issues such as respiratory distress, cardiac arrest, and traumatic injuries. 
   We hoped to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to life-threatening situations and emergencies, minimize fatalities through effective and coordinated response, including appropriate triage of victims, prevent the aggravation of injuries through effective and coordinated response, including safe transport of victims when necessary. We also wanted to be able to provide first aid as appropriate to emergency/disaster victims and prevent responders from becoming victims. Also another important goal was to coordinate with outside emergency responders such as state and local emergency authorities.
Although we are fortunate that we haven’t found ourselves in a real emergency situation, we test our emergency plan in a regular bases to keep it up to date and make necessary changes according to new needs, goals and objectives.