Starting evacuations manually - Evacuation Assistant 1.3.0

You can manually start an evacuation from an area from Security Desk.

Before you begin

Ensure the following:
- You have the Start/stop evacuations privilege.
- You have access to the required partition.
- At least one mustering area is configured for your secured areas.
- The events related to evacuations are monitored.
- The areas relevant to the evacuation are monitored.
Evacuations can be manually started and stopped from tasks in Security Desk. Examples of tasks include operation tasks such as the Monitoring and People counting tasks, investigation tasks where you can filter by area, such as the Area activities, Door activities, Cardholder activities, Visitor activities, and Area presence tasks, and the System status task when monitoring areas.

When you start an evacuation from a parent area, its child areas will also be under evacuation, but the evacuation in the child areas can only be stopped by stopping the evacuation from the parent area.
IMPORTANT: If an evacuation area is updated with a new child area while an evacuation is in progress, the new child area is not included in the evacuation and the cardholders in that child area are not given an Unknown status.
The mustering area configured for the parent area will also serve as the mustering area for its child areas regardless of whether or not the child areas have assigned mustering areas.
If you start an evacuation from a child area without an assigned mustering area, the mustering area used for the evacuation will be the mustering area configured for the parent area.

From the Security Desk home page, open the appropriate task.
From the entity tree, right-click the area for which to start the evacuation, and select Start evacuation.

In the entity tree, the icon of the area for which you started the evacuation changes to

, and the icons of the assigned mustering areas change to

Monitor the progress of the evacuation from one of the following:
- The Active evacuations task in Security Desk
- The Evacuation Assistant portal
You can stop the evacuation by right-clicking the area and selecting Stop evacuation.
A dialog box asking you to confirm that you want to stop the evacuation opens. Click OK. Evacuation data is archived and available using the Evacuation activities task.

An Archiving evacuation data dialog box opens displaying the success or failure of saving the evacuation data. Click Close.