Emergency action plan
Emergency action plan is the documented set of procedures an event follows in a serious incident — fire, medical emergency, severe weather, security threat — covering evacuation routes, alarm and announcement protocols, staff roles, assembly points, and decision authority. Venues and authorities typically require one before an event is licensed.
The plan's real product isn't the document, it's the answer to one question under pressure: who decides, and what happens in the first five minutes. A workable emergency action plan names the decision chain (usually organizer, venue duty manager, and emergency services in a defined hierarchy), scripts the announcements, maps evacuation routes that match the actual booth layout rather than the empty hall, and assigns staff to doors, assembly points, and accessibility support. It gets briefed to floor staff and contractors — not just filed — and walked physically before doors open. Commercially, it's the event's licence to exist: authorities and insurers require it, and after any incident, the first document examined is this one and whether reality followed it. The common mistake is inheriting the venue's generic plan and never adapting it to the show: the venue's evacuation map assumes an empty hall, and your floor plan just blocked two of its routes with a double-deck booth. Reconcile the two, every edition. One honest nuance: plans that have never been rehearsed fail on vocabulary alone — staff who've never heard the coded alarm phrase don't react to it. Even one tabletop run-through with team leads before opening dramatically changes how the first five minutes go.
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Emergency action plan is the documented set of procedures an event follows in a serious incident — fire, medical emergency, severe weather, security threat — covering evacuation routes, alarm and announcement protocols, staff roles, assembly points, and decision authority. Venues and authorities typically require one before an event is licensed.
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