Disabled persons + fire safety

[Gary Howe]

I have been assisting a building manager with a personal emergency egress plan for his disabled staff, which number approx 20. All fire wardens on site have been trained in basic fire safety measures including evac chairs (which are available on all floors).

The problem at the moment is all disabled staff have access to all 12 floors of the building, escape is via two pressurised stairwells either end of the building. At the time of the fire alarm activating, the fire wardens do not have a clue where these people are?, in order to assist them down the stairwells (there are no FF or Evac lifts). There are no dedicated refuge points currently available.

Disabled visitors are only allowed access to the ground floor meeting rooms.

Can you suggest any potential ideas for this situation, as at the moment when the fire alarm goes off the fire wardens run around like Turkey being chased by Bernard Matthews!!!!!!

Many Thanks

Gary.

[Brian Catton]

Gary,
To answer this one you must make a risk assessment based on the disabilities involved. Different disabilities will require different control measures, or perhaps none at all. What are the disabilities involved.?
The two pressurised staircases will normally suffice as alternative temporary places of initial safety provided that the pressurisation systems are protected and they discharge to a place of ultimate safety.
It is not a matter of tracking the disabled persons but rather assisting them to respond effectively, with assistance if required, to the emergency alarms/procedures in the building.
Please provide more info re disabilities.

[colin todd]

The staircases can only be refuges if a wheelchair would not obstruct the staircase for able bodied people. Can refuges not be created within lobbies or maybe protected corridors, etc. The answer to knowing where they are I am afraid is simply to bite the bullet and put in a suitable comms system to BS 5839-9 in every refuge. As it is an existing building you might relax the 2 way comms aspect and use designated MCPs of a fire alarm system, dedicated to disabled comms. If you use a wireless system the installation work/cost would be minimized. The nice thing about disabled evac is that you can make up ad hoc solutions rather than following rigid prescription, so long as what you devise is robust.

[Gary Howe]

Brian,Colin

Thanks for your suggestions, to answer your point Brian all disabled staff working in this building are confined to wheelchairs, and they are able to make their own way around the building to attend meetings etc,etc, they do not have any mental disabilitys.

The pressuirised staircases do not have enough room to create refuge areas, (2m2 for wheelchairs I think!) because if you did it would impede other persons using the staircases.

Is this enough additional information?

[Ken Taylor]

Are the fire wardens sufficient, willing and able to transfer/assist 20 willing disabled persons from their wheelchairs into evac chairs and then take them down the stairways - in some (or all?) cases from the 12th floor? In my experience it can be difficult enough to get people to act as fire wardens and to be available whenever they might be needed let alone accepting this sort of manual handling task.

[Ian Currie]

Gary
Not on the same scale as your problem but I,ve got  some bigish high schools with disabled access to all floors, old fashioned staircases and a limited budget for escape chairs. We have to analyse pupil movements across the school week and position the equipment best we can. The rest comes down to training. Are there occasions when all your wheelchair users congregate in one area? Does that area have access to both stairs?

We also realised during the planning that you cannot re-use an evac chair unless you have a place to leave the disabled person outside, which also entails another transfer and time penalty.

Out of curiousity, how long do your evacuations take and do all the wheelchair users participate? I get resistance to this from my H&S colleagues on the grounds that the drill poses a greater risk to them than the chance of a fire happening and trapping them.

[Gary Howe]

Ian,

Alas no there are no occasions when all the wheelchair users congregate in one area.

In this building the evacuations take between 7mins and a max of 12 mins with only a small number of wheelchair users participating.

The crux of this problem seems to be good fire safety management (as usual) and training, training and more training.

Any more responses would be welcome.

[Guest]

Gary,

As if you (we) don't have enough trouble trying to crack this particular nut - check out the new Part M of the Building Regulations 2000 and part 4 of the disability discrimination Act 1995. It's quite frightening.
The Association of Building Engineers are running some interesting and worthwhile seminars on this topic around the country, so might be worth your while getting booked onto one.

[Gary Howe]

Cresco,

Thanks for the reply, I will see if there is a website with details of forthcoming seminars.

Regards


Gary.

[Guest]

I would give the ABE's courses a wide berth.  The organisation is run by a load of serving and retired local authority building control officers, and they find it difficult to disguise their prejudices.  In fact, certain of their 'trainers' go out of their way to discourage their students from considering fire engineering methods, and seem to delight in bad mouthing the fire engineering profession.  Well, I suppose the old guys see new and innovative ideas a bit of a threat, especially when they are not clever enough to understand engineering- it's easy to follow the 'designing by numbers' approach of prescriptive rules.

[Guest]

Bit unfair that, I feel, 'Guest' - but perhaps all the more reason for folk like you to pop along and have your say.
In my view the issue of 'disabled access' and consequently their means of escape, must surely require more 'fire engineering'. Indeed, I don't know really how  these problems can be solved without 'engineering'.

[Ken Taylor]

I agree, Cresco.

Training, training, training is fine when you have able and willing people to do the job. Engineering, engineering, engineering can make things happen.

[Ian Currie]

Engineering is fine and dandy and is a valuable design concept, but no matter how many safeguards you provide you will still need to evacuate at some time or another. Can you design out all evacuation problems in a building? Apart from specialist buildings such as shopping malls, how many multi-storey buildings allow unassisted disabled evacuation from all floors? Using ramps instead of stairs carries too high a space penalty and is unlikely to be considered in the likes of an office block. Even if you put in evacuation lifts you still need a staircase.

How much harder then to provide adequate evacuation facilities in an existing building?

It is not now, and I think never liable to be, a choice between management solutions or engineering solutions but a combination of both.

While building owners are rushing headlong into providing access we need to be flexible and innovative to keep up. It is basic risk management to remove as much of the risk as possible (by engineering or prescription as appropriate) and then manage the residual risk. In this context training and engineering are simply two sides of the same coin. Engineering may give you the tools but you still need to be trained to get the best out of them.

[Ken Taylor]

- and I agree with you too, Ian.

Too often the evacuation of disabled persons is ignored, left mistakenly to the fire brigade or provided for by a few Evac+chairs  in the hope that some volunteers will be around and do the right thing at the time. We should now be planning reasonable adjustments to buildings to enable disabled people to get in and out safely and designing new buildings for this use. Evac+chairs and the like have their place in fire planning but not as the first or 'easy' option. We could, perhaps consider their provision in a similar way to personal protective equipment in the workplace in that employers are required to seek to remove or reduce the hazards first and only go for PPE when the risk still remains. We used to be taught the 3 'E's some years ago and I consider them still relevant (Engineering, Enforcement, Education).

[Guest]

Hello

Simple answer is to do personal evacuation plans for each less abled person that way you can sit them down talk them in great length about their impairments (ie yes person may be wheelcahir bound but able to walk some distance without it etc etc)

Then may look to issue everyone disabled person with a resticted mobile phone which can only dial out a preset emeregcny number.

In an emergency disabled persons call you from mobile telling you where they are. We have put this type of system into operation with a university client of ours, so far it is wroking very well indeed.

 These are very cheap to use and may be more cost effective that instaling refuge communicators, however downside is the signal and battery levels - you will need to do training on that and make sure all persons keep phone charged.