Floor Captain/Building Chair

Should you have any questions concerning Floor Captain responsibilities, please contact University Safety and Assurances.  You can also access a Current Floor Captain Roster here.

Floor Captain Responsibilities During a Fire

The position of Floor Captain is that of a volunteer, providing aid to other building occupants, visitors and students in the event of an emergency. Floor captains are responsible for knowing all exit locations from occupied areas of their building. Floor captains are NOT, however, expected to risk their personal safety by delaying their own evacuation from a building in order to perform rescue or structural firefighting activities for which they are neither properly trained, nor equipped.

To help achieve safe, orderly evacuations and provide the best possible aid to others, Floor Captains are to implement these steps whenever a fire alarm begins to sound:

  1. At the sound of the evacuation alarm, proceed to an exit and verify it is usable, i.e. free of smoke and obstructions. (For information on the evacuation routes for your building, please review the Emergency Evacuation Maps for your building.)
  2. Calmly and clearly announce that the building must be evacuated and direct people to leave via this exit in a calm and orderly fashion.
  3. Caution occupants against the use of elevators.
  4. With evacuation underway, quickly check their assigned Floor area to make certain that no one is left behind.
  5. As soon as their assigned area has been checked, complete their own evacuation of the building.
  6. If the recommended evacuation route should become blocked, carefully reroute all evacuees to another available exit.
  7. Encourage people to move at least 100 feet away from the building and away from the building entrances.*
  8. Re-entry into the building is not permitted unless authorized by Fire Department personnel.

REMEMBER: At all times, your personal safety is of paramount importance. At no time should any of these activities be undertaken if your personal safety will be at risk.

*The Department of University Safety and Assurances is in the process of assessing the locations that has been designated as “Areas of Assembly” for campus buildings. These designated assembly areas are located in an open area away from the building and out of the way of responding emergency personnel vehicles, fire lanes, fire hydrants and equipment staging areas. There may be more than one assembly area designated depending on the size of the building, type of evacuation event and the location of the exits. These proposed locations will be evaluated to determine their suitability.

Once these “Areas of Assembly” have been evaluated and final locations selected, information on the locations will be shared with the building occupants. Floor captains should become familiar with the designated “Areas of Assembly” for their building and will assist occupants in moving to the assembly area(s) during an actual evacuation.

Floor Captain’s Role During Fire Drill

  1. Monitor corridors on assigned floor to ensure personnel are moving toward exits.
  2. Check restrooms on assigned floor to ensure they have been evacuated. Concentrate on public areas. Office managers, classroom lecturers, and laboratory or workshop heads should be responsible for advising occupants in their areas to evacuate.
  3. Make sure fire doors on enclosed stairways and exits are closed and not blocked open.
  4. Assist and/or direct occupants with limited mobility to the stairwell, or down stairs if able to negotiate stairway.
  5. Make sure that the people that have evacuated the building move a safe distance (at least 100 feet) away from the exit.
  6. Prevent re-entry into the building until the fire drill coordinator announces the “All-Clear” signal.
  7. Once the “All-Clear” signal has been given, return to the assigned meeting location and report presence of anyone still on your Floor.
  8. Fill out the Fire Drill Response Form for your building and turn it in to the fire drill coordinator.

Floor Captain Responsibilities During a Tornado

(or other “Shelter-in-Place” Emergency)

Floor captains may be called upon to serve as liaisons within their building to receive critical information (phone call, email or other means) from appropriate UWM offices and to relay the information to building occupants (e.g. tornado; chemical release). Your role will be to make a sweep of the floor to which you are assigned to ensure that everyone is responding appropriately. This may include directing individuals to evacuate to a shelter or finding aid for someone having difficulty moving to a shelter, assuming such action can be done safely. Not everyone will be familiar with shelter locations so you may need to direct people to them.

The floor captain is to check each room on their designated floor to ensure that all occupants are aware of the emergency and the need to respond. The captains are responsible only for warning all individuals on their floor, but are not responsible for convincing or forcing people to take shelter. Ask people to move quickly and calmly to shelter areas using the nearest stairwell.

Notify the building chair or emergency responders of any suspected or known unsafe conditions present on their floor.

Tornado Drill Training for Floor Captains (Tornado Awareness Week)

REMEMBER: At all times, your personal safety is of paramount importance. At no time should any of these activities be undertaken if your personal safety will be at risk.

Building Chair Information

Public Address Systems in Campus Buildings

General Information:

Alarm Panel

For those buildings with public address systems, building chairs will be given keys to the panels to enable them to make announcements to the building occupants and provide specific information to building occupants in the event of an emergency. Building chairs are not authorized to use the PA system for any other purpose or to silence alarms or to reset the alarm panel. Facility Services investigates all building fire alarms.

Building Chairs must review, sign and date the “Access to UWM’s PA Systems and Fire Alarm Panels” prior to receiving a key to the Fire Alarm Panel. This signed document will be held by the University Safety and Assurances (USA) department and upon receipt, the USA will issue the key.

The keys are issued to specific individuals and may only be issued to building chairs from the USA department. If a building chair discontinues his or her building chair position, the key(s) must be returned to USA. The new building chair will be issued a key after he/she returns a signed and dated “Access to UWM’s PA Systems and Fire Alarm Panel” form.

There are a number of different pubic address systems used on campus:

The majority of the buildings have either a Siemens or Simplex system.

The following buildings have Siemens panels in their building:

  • Chemistry
  • Curtin
  • EMS
  • Enderis
  • Engelmann
  • Garland
  • Greene
  • Holton
  • Johnston
  • Merrill
  • Mitchell*
  • Pearse
  • Sabin*
  • Sandburg — (Siemens “Cerberus Pyrotronics”)
  • Vogel

The instructions for operating the public address system in these buildings is as follows:

Alarm Panel
  1. Unlock the panel
  2. Request access to the panel by pressing the “Request Access”* button
  3. Wait a few seconds
  4. Press the “All Call” button
  5. Wait a few seconds
  6. Pick up the microphone, press and hold down the button on the microphone. There will be an audible beep. (At this point the strobe lights in the building will be flashing)
  7. Wait until it clears and then you can make your announcement (Refer to prepared text provided by Facilities Services)
  8. When you’ve completed your announcement, hang up the microphone
  9. Press the “All Call” button again. This will shut off the strobe lights
  10. Close and lock the panel

To view a videoclip overview of the above instructions, please use this link: Instructions for Siemens Panel

*The procedures for using the public address system in Mitchell and Sabin are slightly different. These panels do not have a “Request Access” button. To operate these systems:

Alarm Panel
  1. Unlock the panel
  2. Press the “All Call” button
  3. Wait a few seconds
  4. Pick up the microphone, press and hold down the button on the microphone. There will be an audible beep. (At this point the strobe lights in the building will be flashing)
  5. Wait until it clears and then you can make your announcement (Refer to prepared text provided by Facilities Services)
  6. When you’ve completed your announcement, hang up the microphone
  7. Press the “All Call” button again. This will shut off the strobe lights
  8. Close and lock the panel

The following buildings are equipped with the Simplex alarm systems:

  • Cunningham
  • Library
  • Klotsche
  • Kunkle
  • Norris
  • Union
Alarm Panel

Instructions for operating the public address systems in these buildings is as follows:

Alarm Panel
  1. Unlock the panel
  2. Press the “All Call” button
  3. Pick up the microphone and hold down the button. A series of beeps will go over the PA System — wait until it clears
  4. Make your announcement (Refer to prepared text provided by Facilities Services)
  5. Replace microphone in holder
  6. Hit the “All Call” button again. It will take a couple of seconds to clear
  7. Close and lock the panel

For a videoclip overview of these instructions, please use this link: Instructions for Simplex Panel

Instructions for ESI System located in the Fine Arts Complex (Art, Music, Theatre and Lecture Hall):

  • Unlock the panel
  • Press the “All Page” button. This will allow PA announcements to go to Music, Theatre, Art and Arts Lecture.
  • There is a “Ready to Page” button that will light up
  • Pick up the microphone and make your announcement
  • After the announcement, press “All Page” button
  • To announce the “All Clear”, push the “All Page” button again. Wait for the “Ready to Page” light
  • Pick up the microphone and announce “All Clear”
  • Hit the “All Page” button again
  • Close and lock the panel

Instructions for “Notifier” System located in Lapham Hall and the School of Business:

You will be using only the bottom panel (next to the microphone) Don’t push any of the buttons located on the top two sections:

  • Push the “All Call” button once
  • Pick up the microphone
  • Depress and hold the microphone button
  • As you start speaking look at “audio level light” (Light should be green when you’re speaking loudly enough)
    • When paging talk loudly enough to cause this LED to illuminate.
    • NOTE: If the audio level LED is allowed to remain off for 30 seconds a system trouble will result.
  • When you’re done, press “All Call” button again to clear
  • Close and lock the panel