Mock evacuation held at Manoir du Lac

Manoir du Lac staff evacuated residents to the dining room and outside in the courtyard to wait for the "all clear".

Recreation coordinator Joanne Freeman and Nurse Manager Rhonda McKeon helped to conduct the evacuation.

Susan Thompson
for Express

Manoir du Lac in McLennan held a fire drill and mock evacuation of the facility on Tuesday in cooperation with the fire department.

“We just want to run through this to be prepared in case of a real emergency, so staff, seniors and the fire department know what to do,” explained Gene S. Zinyk, Vice President Operations for Manoir du Lac.

The Manoir has held other practice fire drills before but not a full evacuation.

“This is for the safety of residents and staff because of recent fires in seniors homes in Edmonton and Calgary,” says Zinyk. “That’s why we decided to make it public, to show we’re putting procedures in place.”

A fire at the LifeStyle Options Whitemud Retirement Community in Edmonton at the end of May left 150 seniors temporarily homeless, while a fire at a High Prairie seniors centre on the same weekend displaced 22 residents. A fire at Britannia Gardens seniors home in Edmonton in 2008 forced about 65 seniors to flee the premises. No seniors were harmed in any of the fires thanks to evacuation procedures.

The Manoir has been working on its own emergency procedures for some time.

“It’s been an ongoing procedure development over the last year and a half. We’ve done staff training and training of of residents to inform them of the components of the building,” says administrator Helen Carriere

Colin McAleer, a safety consultant who serves as the High Prairie School Division’s safety officer and also the division’s Director of the Emergency Operations Centre, helped run the drill in cooperation with the Manoir’s Emergency Response Team. R.A. John McDermott, Director of Protective Services, was on hand to observe the Manoir’s practice evacuation. Alarms were triggered and staff temporarily evacuated residents to safe zones in the dining area and courtyard. Once all residents were evacuated fire chief John McDermott gave the all clear, and residents were returned to their rooms.

Manoir du Lac was built with fire safety in mind.

McAleer explained the building is built to have different zones. Fire doors allow staff to close off different areas of Manoir du Lac, and the floor/roof in between the first and second floors of the building is made of cement so it also acts as a firewall.

“As you move down the (second floor) hallway for example, you become safer and safer because there are more fire doors between you and the fire,” McAleer says.

“It’s to protect residents but it’s also to buy time to move people to safe zones.”

Staff need practice evacuating because they must be ready to contend with the limited mobility of many residents.

Residents who can’t be moved from their rooms or refuse to move must be written down as part of staff’s emergency paperwork and left where they are in order to focus on evacuating as many other residents as possible.

The fire department is then informed of which residents, if any, still remain in their rooms so they can find and safely evacuate those residents.

Staff must also learn to take residents to the furthest available exit, instead of the closest one, which is the more common practice but not effective in the zoned institutional setting of the Manoir.

Overall, the drill was a success, helping make the staff and residents that much more prepared for any potential emergency.

“It went fairly well but some things like paperwork could have gone faster,” says McAleer

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