WOBO Governor David Gibson has a focussed interest on the built environment and peoples behaviour.  This article was significant in terms of people, peoples actions and movement in the event of fire and the use of lifts for evacuation.  Positive reading…

The paper accessed through Springer Link prepared by Axel Mossberg, Daniel Nilsson and Kristin Andrée focusses on human behaviour and the use of “occupant evacuation elevators in case of fire”.

Past studies suggest that people are often reluctant to use occupant evacuation elevators in case of fire. However, existing research is scarce and current knowledge is based on questionnaire studies and laboratory experiments. An unannounced evacuation experiment was therefore performed on the 16th floor of a 35-floor high-rise hotel building. Sixty-seven participants took part and eye-tracking glasses were used to collect data on exit choice and eye fixations. Three different scenarios were studied, including two different hotel room locations on the floor and a variation of guidance system for one of these locations, i.e., flashing green lights next to the evacuation sign at the elevators. Results suggest that people typically choose the elevator for evacuation, even if their hotel room was located closer to the evacuation stair. Flashing green lights next to an evacuation sign made people look more at this sign. However, in spite of looking more at the sign, the flashing light was not shown to significantly improve compliance with the sign. Also, the results suggest that a detector activated self-closing fire door without vision panels to the elevator lobby made it more difficult to find the evacuation elevators in an emergency.

Society is facing new challenges in the built environment as urban populations grow. The growth of urban populations has recently been declared as one of the Societal Grand Challenges of fire safety science by the International Association of Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) [1]. IAFSS acknowledges that both the increase in urban population and the demographics of that population have changed dramatically in recent years and will keep changing in the future, which will affect the fire safety needs of society…..