Emergency Action Plan Requirements, Accounting for All Employees After Evacuation

Most emergency action plans read well until the alarm sounds. The exit routes are mapped, the wardens are named, the assembly point is painted at the far end of the lot. Then the plan reaches the line that decides how long the incident actually lasts: the procedure for accounting for all employees after evacuation. That line is 29 CFR 1910.38(c)(4), one of the six minimum elements of an OSHA emergency action plan, and it is the one a clipboard at the muster point fails exactly when you need it.

The emergency action plan requirements in 1910.38 are brief, and the accounting requirement is the briefest of them. OSHA names no method, no clock, no threshold, which makes the sentence easy to draft and hard to execute. Nothing in it tells you what to do about the contractor crew that badged in at 6 a.m., the visitor in a second-floor conference room, or the supervisor who left by a different door than her crew, roster in hand.

The words quoted below are OSHA's own. What applies at your site is a question for the standard, your own counsel, and, in the 21 states and Puerto Rico whose OSHA-approved plans cover private employers, your state agency.

I. What 29 CFR 1910.38 Actually Requires

The first question is not how to count people. It is whether the plan is required at all. Under 1910.38(a), an employer must have an emergency action plan whenever an OSHA standard in Part 1910 requires one. Process safety management is the clearest case: 1910.119(n) requires one for the entire plant in accordance with 1910.38. Where a plan is required, 1910.38(b) sets its form: in writing, kept in the workplace, and available to employees for review, though an employer with 10 or fewer employees may communicate it orally.

Paragraph (c) lists the six minimum elements:

1. Procedures for reporting a fire or other emergency.
2. Procedures for emergency evacuation, including type of evacuation and exit route assignments.
3. Procedures for employees who remain to operate critical plant operations before they evacuate.
4. Procedures to account for all employees after evacuation.
5. Procedures for employees performing rescue or medical duties.
6. The name or job title of every employee who may be contacted for more information about the plan.

Element four is the entire accounting duty: "Procedures to account for all employees after evacuation." Nine words, and the standard stops there.

OSHA's Evacuation Plans and Procedures eTool fills in what the standard leaves open. It suggests designating employees to sweep areas, checking offices and rest rooms before being the last to leave, or conducting a roll call in the assembly area, and its own phrase for the step is to take a head count after the evacuation. On people who are not on your payroll, it says visitors should also be accounted for, and that some employers have visitors and contractors sign in on entry and use that list in the assembly area. Two caveats: the eTool is guidance, not regulation, and the standard's text speaks to employees, so the visitor line is advisory.

II. Three Ways Sites Count People, and Where Each Breaks

1. The printed roster at the assembly point

Someone prints the shift roster in the morning, a warden carries it in a folder, and names get checked off in the parking lot. It is cheap, and close to what OSHA's own guidance describes. It assumes the roster was current when it came off the printer, that the person holding it evacuated with it, and that nobody arrived or left since. The front desk visitor log fails on its own terms: it sits inside the building everyone just left.

2. The access control report

Many sites pull an occupancy list from the access system when the alarm sounds. The limitation is structural: a badge reader answers who came in today, not who is inside now, and never where. Tailgating, interior doors without readers, and anyone who left without badging out push the list away from reality. People leaving through emergency exits badge nowhere at all.

3. Verbal roll call by department

Supervisors count their own crews and report up. This works when crews are small, stable, and standing together, which describes a day shift on an ordinary Tuesday. It degrades at shift change, on overtime and temporary crews, when a group splits across two exits, and when the missing person is the supervisor.

One problem sits underneath all three: each method counts who reached the muster point and says nothing about the people who did not, the question the incident commander needs answered.

Method	What it proves	Where it breaks	Time to a number you trust
Printed roster at the muster point	Who was scheduled	Contractors, visitors, same-day changes	Minutes, longer per disputed name
Access control occupancy report	Who badged in and out	Tailgating, no interior location, stops at the exit	Fast to produce, slow to trust
Verbal roll call by department	That a supervisor saw their own crew	Shift change, split crews, double counting	As slow as the weakest crew
Location-based check-in at the assembly zone	Who arrived, who has not, where the missing were last seen	Tags in lockers, coverage gaps, untagged people	Continuous, unaccounted list at once

III. What an Unresolved Count Costs

OSHA's guidance ties the accounting step to a practical reason: without it, responders can be sent to search for people who already walked out. An unresolved name is not a paperwork item. It is a decision input: whether a crew re-enters a building that is burning or holding a release.

The reverse cost is quieter. Until the count closes, everyone stands in the lot and the site produces nothing, and a count that takes twenty-five minutes in a drill will not go faster in a real event. Fines are the smallest part of it, and for 2026 they did not even move: OSHA's maximums held at $16,550 per serious violation and $165,514 per willful or repeated one, after the government shutdown left BLS unable to publish the October CPI-U figure the adjustment requires.

National numbers are moving the right way, 5,070 fatal work injuries in 2024 against 5,283 in 2023 in the BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries released in February 2026. But the events that empty a building are the ones where a slow answer does damage. We wrote about the responder side in the first number the fire service asks for at a distribution center. This is the other half: not the number they ask for, but the procedure that produces it.

IV. Location-Based Accountability, and What It Changes

A location-based procedure replaces neither the warden nor the plan. It changes what the people running the count are looking at.

The roster is live before the alarm. A real-time location system already knows which zones are occupied, so the starting list is the site as it is, not the roster printed at 6 a.m. Arrival registers on its own once you define the assembly area as a zone, and nobody reads names aloud into the wind. We covered how zone rules get configured in RTLS zone applications.

The remaining list carries locations, which paper cannot do. The distance between "someone is missing" and "one person, last seen in the east mezzanine at 09:14" is the distance between a search and a rescue. ORBRO OS holds that as one screen over the floor plan, and the precision layer underneath is ORBRO UWB RTLS, which resolves position tightly enough to name a room rather than a wing.

Untagged people are the hard part. Visitors, drivers, and short-term contractors are the population a tag-based system misses, and the population a paper visitor log misses too. Camera-based detection through AI Event Manager narrows that gap by watching areas that should be empty once evacuation has begun, so the unaccounted list gets investigated instead of assumed.

The limits deserve the same honesty. A tag in a locker is a person on the floor as far as the system knows, and stairwells and yards go blind unless you cover them on purpose. None of it decides anything: it supports the accounting procedure you wrote and produces the record your plan says you will keep. Settle the data questions in the same document: what is retained, for how long, who sees it, and when the full picture goes on a screen.

In manufacturing deployments we have worked on, the screen that earns its place is not the map. It is the short list beside it: the names that have not arrived, ordered by how long ago the system last saw them.

V. Testing the Procedure in a Drill

Most drills measure how fast the building emptied. Measure the count instead.

1. Time from alarm to a complete accounting

Not time to evacuate. Stop the clock when every person on site is either confirmed at an assembly point or named as a specific unresolved case with a last known location.

2. Unresolved names at fixed marks

Record the list at three, five, and ten minutes. A count that closes at minute four and one that closes at minute twenty-two are different procedures wearing the same words.

3. Contractor and visitor inclusion rate

Of the non-employees on site that day, how many appeared in the accounting at all? Usually the worst number in the exercise, and the cheapest to fix.

4. People at the wrong assembly point

How many reported somewhere other than their assigned area? Each one is a false positive on somebody's missing list.

5. Whether the record wrote itself

If a coordinator has to retype the results into an after-action report, the procedure has a manual step that will not survive a real event.

Run one drill a year at an inconvenient time: at shift change, on nights, or with the primary assembly point unavailable because the wind is wrong. Debrief it in a toolbox talk while people remember where they stood.

VI. What to Settle Before You Instrument Anything

1. Define who and where is in scope

Employees, contractors, temporary staff, visitors, drivers. Each group needs an identification method and a place in the count. Map every assembly point as a zone, alternates included, since those are the ones people use when the primary point sits downwind.

2. Decide the degraded mode

Write down what the site does if the network or the platform is unavailable. The paper roster does not disappear. It gets demoted to a backup.

3. Ask vendors the second question

Most mustering products answer who reached the muster point. Ask what a product shows about the people who did not, how fast, and at what location detail. Then ask how an untagged visitor appears on that screen.

Closing thoughts

The regulation asks for nine words' worth of procedure and leaves the design to you. That makes evacuation accounting a design decision rather than a checkbox, and an event tests it, not an inspector.

Sites that have moved past paper converge on the same shape: one screen with the floor plan, live occupancy by zone, automatic check-in at the assembly point, and a short list of the unaccounted with the time and place each was last seen. ORBRO builds that from three parts: UWB RTLS for position, AI Event Manager for camera-based detection where tags do not reach, and ORBRO OS as the operations view over the whole site. It supports the plan you have written. It does not write the plan for you.

If you are revising your emergency action plan, or your last drill produced a number nobody trusted, the ORBRO team would be glad to walk through what a location-based head count looks like on your floor plan.