Emergency plan rules in Hawaii
One licence type researched, regulated by Hawaii Department of Health — Office of Health Care Assurance. Every requirement below carries the rule that imposes it.
Group home / residential care home
Licensed in Hawaii as Adult Residential Care Home (ARCH), by Hawaii Department of Health — Office of Health Care Assurance.
Haw. Admin. R. §11-100.1 et seq. (adult residential care homes)
Hawaii drill frequency for adult residential care homes has not been verified.
Not yet confirmed for this licence type — the national standard applies in the meantime.
Hawaii's requirement is CONDITIONAL ON GEOGRAPHY: a facility located in an area subject to tsunami action, flooding or similar disaster must have a plan of evacuation to a place of refuge, and that plan must follow LOCAL CIVIL DEFENSE regulations rather than a state template. Two consequences — you must first establish whether your address sits in a tsunami evacuation zone (Hawaii Emergency Management Agency publishes the maps by island), and if it does, the county civil defense agency, not the Department of Health, defines what an acceptable plan looks like.
Haw. Admin. R. §11-100.1 et seq.- Hawaii is the clearest case for deriving hazards from the address rather than asserting them. A facility in Hilo's inundation zone and one at elevation in Volcano carry materially different obligations under the same rule.
- Because the plan follows county civil defense regulations, an operator with homes on more than one island answers to more than one civil defense agency.
- drills — Open HAR §11-100.1 and read the drill subsections. Also confirm whether the tsunami evacuation duty carries its own drill cadence separate from fire drills.
Reviewed 2026-07-30
What this page is
The requirements Hawaii places on a facility emergency preparedness plan, taken from the state’s own rules rather than a national template. Where we have confirmed something against primary text it is stated plainly; where we have not, it says so and names what to check. Nothing here is inferred from what other states do.
The part that is the same everywhere
The federal floor does not vary by state. OSHA 29 CFR §1910.38 binds any employer: reporting an emergency, evacuation and exit-route assignments, critical-operations shutdown, accounting for everyone afterwards, rescue and medical duties, and naming who to ask about the plan. That layer, plus the exit-route, alarm and first-aid rules and the fire code’s plan structure, is covered in the main crash course rather than repeated on all fifty state pages.
Write the plan
The Emergency Plan Builder produces the document itself and is driven by this same research, so the two cannot disagree about what Hawaii requires. The Compliance Calendar puts the drills and inspections on dates.