The people who are on nobody's roster.
The federal rule says employees. OSHA's own guidance says visitors should be accounted for too, and suggests the sign-in list as the way to do it. The gap between those two sentences is where the contractor crew, the agency labour, the auditor and the delivery driver are standing when the alarm goes.
- The rule29 CFR 1910.38(c)(4) says all employees. It uses no other word.
- The guidanceVisitors also should be accounted for, says OSHA, and contractors can sign in on entry.
- CoordinationAdvised between employers sharing a site, and, OSHA says, not specifically required.
Why the count misses them.
Because the roster the count is made from is a payroll list, and they are not on it.
On an ordinary working day at an industrial site, a meaningful share of the people inside the fence do not work for the company that owns it. Contractor crews, agency labour, maintenance technicians, inspectors, hauliers, sales engineers and the occasional auditor. They walk in through a different door, sign a different book, answer to a different supervisor and appear on no roster the safety team holds.
Then the alarm goes, and the count is made against the list that exists. Everyone on it is found, the count comes back complete, and the count is complete about the wrong population.
The rule is narrower than most people assume, and the guidance is broader. Both halves are worth knowing exactly.
What the rule says, and what the guidance adds.
One word in the standard does all the work, and it is employees.
Procedures to account for all employees after evacuation;
Employees. Not persons, not personnel, not everyone on site. So the honest answer to does OSHA require you to account for contractors and visitors is that the emergency action plan standard does not say so.
OSHA's own guidance goes further than its own rule:
Visitors also should be accounted for following an evacuation and may need additional assistance when exiting. Some employers have all visitors and contractors sign in when entering the workplace and use this list when accounting for all persons in the assembly area. The hosts and/or area wardens, if established, are often tasked with helping these individuals safely evacuate.
And in the same passage, on the coordination that would make any of it work:
You also may find it beneficial to coordinate the action plan with other employers when several employers share the worksite, although OSHA standards do not specifically require this.
Read those three quotations together and the position is uncomfortable but clear. Each employer owes the duty for its own people. Accounting for everybody else is advice. Coordinating between the employers, which is the only way anybody ends up with a single reliable answer, is advice that OSHA marks as not specifically required. Nobody on a multi-employer site owes the complete count, which is precisely why it so often does not exist.
What the investigations found.
Two specific failures, both about the people who were not on the list.
Contractors were excused from the drills
The United States Coast Guard's investigation into the loss of the Deepwater Horizon examined the drill records. Alongside a finding that no complete muster of personnel was conducted onboard, it recorded how the drills had been run:
According to the records of drills, the marine crew and the drill crew performed all required drills within their respective occupations, but the entire crew did not collectively participate in the fire and abandonment drills because of drilling operations. 95% of the time, the drill crew would take their muster and emergency preparations on the Drill Floor. Third party contractors were excused from the drills.
The last sentence is the whole problem in six words. The people least familiar with the muster arrangements were the ones given the least practice at them, and the reason was operational rather than negligent: stopping the work to include them cost too much.
The list was inside the building
The Chemical Safety Board investigated an explosion at a Kentucky plant in November 2024. Debris and a downed power line made the planned gathering location unreachable, two improvised groups formed instead, and then:
The groups had no documentation with them detailing who had been inside the facility at the time of the incident, and they therefore relied on memory when conducting head counts to determine whether anyone was remaining in the building.
A sign-in book answers the contractor and visitor question only while somebody is holding it. On a reception desk it is a record of who arrived, rarely a record of who left, and it is inside the building on the one day the building is the emergency. The rest of what that investigation found.
The oldest working answer, and the three ideas in it.
Not software. A brass tag on a board, written into US federal law in 1969.
Each operator of a coal mine shall establish a check-in and check-out system which will provide positive identification of every person underground, and will provide an accurate record of the persons in the mine kept on the surface in a place chosen to minimize the danger of destruction by fire or other hazard.
That sentence contains three ideas the OSHA standard never wrote down, and every one of them addresses a failure documented above:
- Check-in and check-out. Somebody who left site at four and is now at home is the most common false alarm at any assembly point, and the search that gets sent looking for them is real. The fix is at the gate, not the car park.
- Positive identification of every person. Every person, not every employee. The duty attaches to being underground, which is the condition that actually matters in an emergency, rather than to who signs the pay cheque.
- The record kept away from the hazard. Deliberately on the surface, in a place chosen so fire cannot destroy it. That is the exact defect the Chemical Safety Board found fifty-five years later.
It is worth being clear about scope: this binds underground coal operators and nobody else. It is here because it is the clearest statement in United States law of what a working answer looks like, not because it applies to your site.
What Panora holds, and where it stops.
A board can only show the people it knows about. What it knows about is the question.
Contractor company prequalification and expiry dates are recorded alongside project information and documents, and crew sign-in and recorded hours can be reviewed when that is enabled. Crews can reach a project or complete a configured form from a QR code on site without holding an account, which is the part that decides whether a visiting crew is reachable at all. When an emergency event or a drill runs, the people coordinating it get a shared view of attendance and check-in status on the muster board, and the event keeps an after-action report.
Location can be checked at check-in when a muster point is configured for it and the person shares their phone's location. Panora does not track people continuously.
Where it stops
- Whoever is not known to the workspace is not on the board. They are not an unaccounted row that somebody will chase. They are absent from the count entirely, which is the same failure as the sign-in book left on the desk, in a different medium.
- Sign-in is still an act somebody has to perform. A contractor who walks in behind a colleague is invisible to any system, including this one.
- It settles nothing about who owes the duty. On a multi-employer site, which employer accounts for whom is a question for the employers and their own advisers. Panora records what happened; it does not allocate responsibility for it.
Questions about contractors, visitors and shared sites
- Does OSHA require you to account for contractors and visitors?
- The rule says employees. 29 CFR 1910.38(c)(4) requires procedures to account for all employees after evacuation and uses no other word. OSHA's own guidance goes further than the rule and says visitors also should be accounted for, and notes that some employers have all visitors and contractors sign in when entering and use that list at the assembly area. That guidance is advisory; the eight words are the rule.
- Who is responsible when several employers share a site?
- Each employer owes the duty for its own employees. OSHA's guidance suggests coordinating the action plan with the other employers who share the worksite and says in the same breath that OSHA standards do not specifically require it. So on a multi-employer site the coordination that makes a count possible is, at federal level, advice rather than an obligation on anyone.
- Why do contractors go missing from the count?
- Because they are usually not on the roster the count is made from, and often not in the drills either. The United States Coast Guard's investigation into the Deepwater Horizon loss records that third party contractors were excused from the drills, so the people least familiar with the muster arrangements were the ones who had practised them least.
- What is the oldest working answer to this problem?
- A check-in and check-out system with the record kept away from the hazard. It has been federal law for underground coal mines since 1969: 30 CFR 75.1715 requires positive identification of every person underground and an accurate record of who is in the mine, kept on the surface in a place chosen to minimise the danger of destruction by fire or other hazard. That applies to underground coal mining and not to general industry, so it is a precedent rather than a duty you owe.
- Does a sign-in sheet solve it?
- Only partly, and only if it leaves the building with somebody. A sheet on a reception desk records who arrived, rarely records who left, and is inside the building when the building is the problem. The Chemical Safety Board found exactly that at a plant explosion in 2024: the evacuated groups had no documentation with them describing who had been inside, so they conducted head counts from memory.
- What does Panora hold for contractors and visitors?
- Contractor company prequalification and expiry dates are recorded alongside project information and documents, and crew sign-in and recorded hours can be reviewed when that is enabled. Crews can reach a project or complete a configured form from a QR code without holding an account. A check-in board shows the people it knows about, so who is on the roster and who has signed in is what decides whether the board can answer the question.
More on emergency accountability
- Emergency accountability after an evacuation
The rule, the four ways sites count people, and what the investigations found.
- What OSHA requires at a muster point
No location, no distance, no sign, no deadline. What it does require instead.
- Assembly point and muster point
Who uses which word, checked against each authority's own text.
Start with the people
your roster does not have.
Bring how contractors and visitors reach your sites today, and the list you would count from tonight. We will walk through what Panora would hold and what it would still leave open.