A drill is counted twice: the roll from the building's own systems, and the heads counted at the assembly point by two marshals with clickers. Point 3 comes in one over, every drill, for nine years.
I am the fire safety manager for an acute site. Twenty two buildings, about four thousand staff, and a drill programme that runs all year.
The counting is what a drill is, so I will set it out.
Before a drill we know who should be in a building. Staff swipe in on their badges, contractors sign in at reception, and patients are on the ward systems. It is not perfect, and no fire safety manager in the country would tell you it is, but for an office block on a weekday morning it is close.
At the assembly point, two marshals count heads independently with hand clickers, and they compare. If the two counts differ they count again.
Then the counted number goes against the expected number. A shortfall is the emergency: it means somebody is still inside.
An excess is a nuisance. It usually means a visitor, or somebody who wandered over from another building to see what the noise was.
Assembly point 3 is always one over.
Not sometimes. Every drill at that building since I took the job in 2016, which is thirty one drills.
Both marshals agree with each other every time. The count is not in doubt. It is the expected number that it exceeds.
I want to deal with the boring explanations first because they are the likely ones and they took me four years.
A visitor. Obvious, common, and it would not happen thirty one times without once being identified, because a marshal at an assembly point in a high visibility vest asks people who they are.
They have asked. Every drill for the last five years I have had the marshals do a name check as well as a headcount at point 3, because I asked them to, and the name check comes back complete: everybody at the assembly point is somebody who should be at the assembly point.
Everybody accounted for, and one more head than there are names.
Somebody from another building. The nearest is two hundred metres away with its own point. The marshals know their own staff by sight.
The swipe data being wrong. This is the real one, and it is the one I believed longest. A member of staff who came in behind somebody else and did not badge would be inside and not on the roll, so the count would exceed expected by one and nothing would be strange.
That happens across this site and it is why I have a tolerance for it. But it is random: at other buildings the count comes in over or under by a person or two, and it moves around.
Point 3 is over by exactly one, thirty one times.
The building.
It is a 1970s block: pathology on the ground and two floors of offices above.
I have sweep records for every drill. Two marshals sweep each floor, check every room including the toilets and the plant room, and sign the sheet.
Every sweep has come back clear.
Which is the part that closes the circle, because if the building is clear and the assembly point has one more person than the building had, then the extra head walked out of a building that has been swept and signed for.
The photograph.
In 2022 the trust ran a full evacuation exercise with observers from the fire service, which is a big thing and happens rarely.
One of their observers took photographs of the assembly points, for their own report, which I did not commission and could not have influenced.
I asked for a copy of the report and got it, because we are entitled to it.
Point 3's photograph shows the assembly point from the far side of the car park, everybody in it, in their groups.
I have counted the heads in that photograph forty or fifty times. It agrees with the marshals.
I have also matched every face I can to a person, because I know that building, and I got to all but one.
The one is at the back, on the left, in the second row of the group, and you can see the top of a head and a shoulder and nothing else, because there is somebody in front.
Not a face. Just a person who is there, in a photograph taken by a fire officer, in a count that two marshals with clickers agree on.
What I write in the report.
Every drill produces one, and it goes to the fire safety committee, and it has a line for the count.
For thirty one drills that line has said: all persons accounted for.
That is true. It is the only sentence available: nobody is missing, the sweeps are clear, the building is empty, everybody has a name.
The excess of one goes in the notes field as visitor or passer by, which is the standard phrase and which the committee has never once queried, because an assembly point being one over is the least alarming thing that can happen at a drill.
The last thing, and it is why I have written this rather than filed it.
The point of a drill is the real thing.
If that building goes up, my marshals will count heads at point 3 and get one more than the roll, and they will report all persons accounted for, and the incident commander will be told the building is clear.
And that will be right, thirty one times out of thirty one, and I have to hope it is right the thirty second, because the alternative is a fire officer going back into a burning building to look for somebody who has been standing in the car park at every drill for nine years.