Implementation of E-Pres system during a school evacuation drill at Heraklion Crete, Greece

After a period of testing E-Pres system with school classrooms that had visited the Natural History Museum of Crete and standardizing the process for implementation school evacuation drills, the Museum organized the first implementation of the system at a primary school of Heraklion, Crete, Greece. The drill was implemented on the 21 of December 2016 at the 20th and 56th Primary schools that are hosted in the same building. The system was set in place and tested in the afternoon of the 20th of December and the tags for 11 classrooms and 249 pupils in total were registered in the system. The building hosts 21 classrooms with 448 pupils in total.
In order to evaluate the whole evacuation plan we had chosen the defined 11 classrooms and we established 7 check points in three floors. Drill was executed for the whole building during the second course on the morning of 21st of December. The E-pres system corresponded perfectly and recorded the whole evacuation drill. The drill was executed in accordance to the existing evacuation plan and in less time than initially foreseen. Each classroom’s route was monitored all over the drill, the pupils’ and teachers’ correspondence was traced through the selected check points and the evacuation time for each classroom was estimated. The contribution of E-pres system helped to evaluate the whole evacuation plan, to point out areas of pupils’ crowding, to identify routes that could serve evacuation needs for more classrooms than those scheduled in the plan and to better manage the evacuation time.