Every evacuation plan ends with the same question, and today it is answered from memory.
The plan has to answer it — Estonian fire safety rules require a written plan for what happens in a fire, and every one of them ends at the assembly point with a single question: is anybody still inside.
The answer is a roll call — Group by group, from memory, outdoors, in the dark, while people are still arriving.
Visitors are on nobody's list — A contractor's crew, a driver, an auditor, someone waiting at reception: none of them appear in any department's headcount.
The visitor book stays behind — It is on the desk in the building everyone has just left.
Presence is recorded continuously, so the answer exists before anyone has to ask for it.
By zone, not by building — You see who was in which hall or yard, so a search starts in one place instead of everywhere.
The record is not in the building — It is in the cloud and on your phone. Gateways can lose power, burn or drop off the network; the last picture before that stays exactly as it was.
Everyone with a tag is on it — Contractors and visitors carry one for the day, so they appear on the same list as the shift.
Restricted zones — When a tag is read somewhere that person is not allowed to be, you know it at the time, not from a report a week later.
Drills stop being a guess — You get the minutes each zone took to empty and who reached the assembly point last.
Answer the one question that matters in the first minute — and keep the answer where the fire cannot reach it.