Fire Evacuation

[carol]

Hi, wonder has anyone got any thoughts on this:
one of my sites is considering using the car park which will be zoned for departments in the event of evacuation from the building a gate will then be the means of egress and access once everyone is accounted, for, my problem is that i am not sure that one gate is sufficient to evacuate 500 people (the gate measurements havent been forwarded onto me yet) I have told the site that the lock on the gate should fail safe when the fire alarm goes off rather than have somone unlock it
My other concern is that is it safe to allow people to congregate in a cark park when there are vehicles full of fuel?
Gratefull for any help on this

[Martin Burford]

carol

Seems ok to me.. how far is the car park from the building....but in does appear to be a place of relative safety....car parks are used as assembly points in many circumstances.....but in order to provide a full answer would prefer more information.
Conqueror

[kurnal]

Theres no problem in principle in using a car park. The idea being that it is most unlikely that you will have a fire in the car park at the same time as a fire in the building and that both will be untenable at the same time. But it could happen - most unlikely though. How far do you want to go with your planning?  An IRA bomb  was planted in the car park at an army barraks many years ago, the warning was given that there was a bomb in the building and it was detonated as soon as all the people had reported to the assembly point in the car park.

Could a fire in the building or its systems ( bulk LPG store for example) prevent people getting to the single gate - or could there be a problem if the wind was in the wrong direction? Its reasonable to consider the pervailing wind - usually westerly in my area.

How big is the car park- the assembly point shoul;d be at least as far from the building as it is tall- preferably 1.5 times.

Once out of the building there is no set down time to disperse through the gate but if you apply the old formula that a column of 40 persons per minute can pass through a gateway of 500mm  and 80 per minute through a metre gap you can interpolate from there. Anything betweeen 3-8 minutes to pass through would be reasonable- I bet it would be much wider than that.
 I would say if you are well clear of the building the biggest hazard may be being knocked down by the fire appliances,

[carol]

Thanks for all the help I just needed to be sure that this was a practical solution when evacuating the building,