In anticipation of lockdown or an evacuation in the event of a confirmed case on site, a safe shutdown procedure may be required. It is therefore important to consider what is required to stop your work safely, the sequence for shutting off key equipment and the precursors for reentry.
Objective:
To assure the safety and wellbeing of all staff, and give the workforce and key stakeholders the confidence to safely return to work.
Caveats:
This checklist helps assure your workforce and customers that you have taken the appropriate measures to ensure their safety and well-being prior to re-commencing work in an area that may have been infected by a worker.
It is important to note that given the preventative measures advising symptomatic people to not attend work, it is not likely that a full evacuation would be triggered in response to a symptomatic case. The most likely scenario is someone testing positive after self-isolating or identifying symptoms. The process outlined below covers both potential scenarios and defines steps to identify the areas the infected person has been operating, the staff they have had either close or casual contact, and recommends a broad process for removing these people, cleaning any potentially impacted areas and safely returning to work.
- Isolate the worker (if not already self-isolated).
- Identify primary work areas and any other areas they have transited or worked in.
- Identify any other staff that have been in close or casual contact.
- Activate Site Incident Response Team and notify health services and any other relevant stakeholders.
- Identify and brief the staff that were in close and casual contact and send them home to be monitored for 14 days (or as per advice from relevant health authorities).
- Lockdown or isolate non-affected work areas and workers and asses the risks of continuing operations.
- Assess which work areas can and cannot be maintained operationally.
- Identify which equipment needs to be shut down or maintained operationally. Where able (and appropriate) shut down equipment.
- Brief all staff on the next steps and communications arrangements.
- Identify incoming shift and brief them (what’s happened, what’s being done and when to attend).
- Deploy cleaning team (brief them on priority and secondary areas to be cleaned to enable safe and scaled start of operations).
- Perform the clean.
- Incident Response Team Leader to identify the re-entry process and pre-conditions.
- Develop bump-in plan considering what is required to assure the safety of your staff and what technical services are required such as power, electrical safety testing, air conditioner or temperature controlled environments, elevator maintenance (ie in office building), IT servers, emergency alarms and building services.
- Sequence of re-entry as follows:
- Technicians (power, utilities check and electrical safety checks)
- Sortation systems, elevators, manufacturing mechanical re-start
- IT re-start.
- Brief re-entry team.
- Brief back-up shift staff – communicate the plan for re-entry and what has been done to ensure the safe re-start for them.
- Re-enter and re-commence work.
- Stand down the Incident Response team.
- Debrief.