Why Reflective Room Placards Should Be Part Of Your Lockdown Safety Planning
Highly Reflective Rapid Response Room Placards…try saying that five times fast.
Room placards are often an overlooked piece of the puzzle when buildings, especially schools, are putting together their lockdown plans. They aren’t flashy, they don’t light up or make noise like our SmartLights or SmartBox, and they don’t stop 16,000 pounds of force like The Boot door barricade device.
So what are Highly Reflective Rapid Response Room Placards, and why should they be part of your lockdown safety planning?
An Instant Identifier
A lockdown situation can be chaos, especially in a school. For first-responders, there is incredible stress to quickly identify dangerous areas and neutralize threats as quickly as possible. Seconds can save lives in a crisis situation, so having the ability to identify rooms and large spaces instantly can be vital.
By placing an unmistakable identification system throughout your building, and ensuring that system is properly mapped to your building diagrams, you give first-responders the opportunity to move to the correct areas of a building quickly during a lockdown.
If the situation is an emergency other than a lockdown, and expedience is required in moving to the affected location, or moving quickly away from a dangerous location, clearly identifiable room placards can function as unmistakable guides through a building.
Visibility, Even In The Dark
Having a rapidly identifiable placard system coordinated with your building diagrams and emergency planning routes is excellent, but what happens if environmental factors like smoke or light make it difficult to see your placards?
This exact question is what led us to create our room placards so that they would be highly reflective. This means that if the visibility in a hallway or open area is low, and first responders still need the ability to see each rooms’ placard, they can do so by shining a light down the hallway. Each placard will become instantly identifiable as the reflective material in the lettering or numbering will reflect the light and “illuminate” the room identifier.
Durability
LockOut Company Highly Reflective Rapid Response Room Placards are made of 16-gauge steel and powder coated. In other words, they are designed to last.
Once installed, unless there is an update to your building floor plan, the placard itself will likely never have to be replaced. They are also low maintenance, and because they are usually attached directly to the wall rather than a door, even if you replace other items in your building, the placards can remain in place.
Fast Installation
Rapid Response Placards are one of the easiest items in the LockOut System to install. This means that you can be up and running with your LockOut System even if you are waiting on approval for other pieces of the system like The Boot™ SmartLights, or SmartBoxes. The placards simply screw onto a wall, so nearly any surface can hold them. In most cases, even in large buildings or across a campus, Rapid Response Placards can be installed in a matter of days.
Customization
Making sure identifiers stand out from their environment isn’t always easy. LockOut Rapid Response Placards meet this challenge by allowing for color, shape, size, and text customization. Their design can meet specific criteria to ensure that they will be easily recognizable, no matter the location or situation.
Flexibility
In the end, the choice of how to identify rooms, hallways, and other areas throughout a building comes down to how we can best protect and direct those who may be in a lockdown situation.
Any system component, whether it be a door barricade, advanced warning or communication system, application, or identifier, should fit within the plan that has been laid out for the building. This becomes especially important when those that need to understand where to go and what to do in a lockdown are children.
By choosing a room identifier that sticks out, makes sense, and coordinates with lockdown and building planning, we can help make buildings of all kinds safer and more organized.
