This section is designed to provide general information, guidelines, and recommendations to help our customers prepare for emergency and disaster situations. It is not intended to be a substitute or replacement for your company's own emergency procedures manual. In fact, it would be impossible for us to develop an emergency procedure manual that would effectively incorporate all of the many unique situations that exist within many of our customer's business operations.  Your own emergency procedures manual should take into account such factors as the nature of your business operations, office layout, employee count, and employee disabilities.  There are, however, certain common features to emergency plans. Most importantly:

• DO NOT PANIC. In some situations, panic may pose a greater threat to your safety than the emergency itself.

• NEVER ASSUME AN ALARM SIGNAL IS FALSE. In some cases, alarms may turn out to be false, but you and your employees should never make that assumption.  In the event of a real emergency, time is of the essence.   In every instance, we will attempt to determine the cause of the alarm as soon as possible and allow everyone to return to the building once we confirm it is safe to do so.

In the event of an emergency situation, the most important step to securing your safety, and the safety of your employees, is emergency planning and preparation.

Each tenant should select a captain and co-captain(s) to establish internal emergency plans and supervise evacuations. The number of co-captains needed depends upon the number of employees and the size of your office. The captains and co-captains must (1) be intelligent and capable of providing leadership in an emergency situation, and, (2) work in their respective areas within the building.