Emergency Management

Emergency management studies preparation for, response to and recovery from incidents that interrupt normal operations: fire, power failure, extreme weather, violent incident. It works with scenarios, escalation levels, crisis organisation structures and exercise programmes, treating the first chaotic hours as a phase that must be rehearsed separately.

FM manages the building and service in which the incident occurs, and is almost always part of the crisis organisation — often the first party informed. Without rehearsed procedures, a manageable incident becomes extended downtime, simply because no one knew who could take which decision.

• Who has the mandate to decide in the first thirty minutes of an incident, without waiting for approval?
• Is the last rehearsed scenario still representative of the current building and current occupancy?
• What is the difference between the building manager's and the tenant's incident plan, and do they align?

• NFPA 1600 / ISO 22320 — incident and crisis management structures.
• Disaster-response doctrine of safety regions (Netherlands) and comparable civil-protection frameworks elsewhere.

• A crisis plan that has never been rehearsed is an assumption about behaviour under pressure, not a verified plan.
• Multi-tenant buildings have multiple, sometimes conflicting crisis organisations that must be aligned in advance.

• Emergency response teams and evacuation organisation
• Security and control room

• Scenario development and exercise programming
• Crisis communication

• In-house (retained) delivery organisation

  In-house staff know the building and each other, which in practice shortens first-response time.

• ISO 22320:2018 — emergency management, incident response. See also ISO 41017:2024 (emergency preparedness and management of an epidemic) in the standards atlas: a published International Standard within the FM series.

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• An evacuation drill testing only the escape route, not decision-making, presented as full crisis preparedness.

How crisis organisations function in permanently hybrid work settings — where part of the occupancy is not physically present yet still part of the continuity question — remains under-researched.

• ISO 22320:2018, emergency management.
• NFPA 1600, standard on continuity and emergency management programmes.