Who You Gonna Call? (Emergency Wardens!)

In this day and age, every school, business and hippie commune is required to have a fire warden.

Hopefully you’re not quietly whispering “what’s a fire warden?“, but if you are, I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear you.

A fire warden is someone (or multiple people, depending on the size and location of the organisation), nicely trained up with the knowledge on how to handle situations in the event of a fire, as well as the measures and actions that should be taken in such circumstances.

As you can imagine, it’s a pretty integral position, and one that everyone should take seriously. Recently at CTC, we’ve made the decision to upgrade all of our Fire Wardens to ‘Emergency Wardens’.

This means several things. Firstly, we have a much cooler name. Face it. Emergency Warden sounds way more impressive than Fire Warden. And secondly, we’re trained in handling a whole range of different emergencies.

Bomb? Armed attacker? Severe weather event? Hazardous spill? You better believe we know the drill. Quite literally.

At this point, you might be asking yourself “why would you need an emergency warden?” Well, believe it or not, in case of an emergency. Why would you need a fire warden? In case of a fire.

Yes, emergencies are (thankfully) not a regular occurrence, but when you’re responsible for a 12ha site full of people, you want to be properly prepared. And safety is always an investment worth making. So is training. It’s an asset to your business…but more than that, it betters your people. As employees, but also as good humans.

Providing them with these critical skills – yes, could certainly prove valuable in your workplace if the need arose; but the knowledge they have, could save lives outside of work too.

We were fortunate enough to be schooled by Mick Gardiner, a Senior Sergeant in the Explosive Ordnance Response Team in the Queensland Police Force. Mick has worked extensively in the police force, with a particular speciality in bombs. And when I say particular speciality, I mean he’s the most qualified bomb squad-er* in Australia (*not the technical term).

We actually did a podcast episode with him, where he talked all things bomb squad and working as a gay man in the police force. You can listen to it here. You definitely should, it’s super interesting. And then you should like and subscribe to our podcast. Just saying.

Anyway, if there’s one thing we learnt from Mick in our training it’s that although we like to pretend that they don’t; emergency events do happen and the knowledge we’re now equipped with can save lives.

With this in mind, how well trained are your staff? What are you investing in? Maybe it’s something to think about…