We had a false alarm go off in the building where I work last week. The elevators automatically shut down forcing the use of the fire escapes. The building is 22 floors. I was lucky in that I’d just taken the elevator to the first floor to step outside on a break. When they finally let us back in, I wondered what someone with mobility issues is expected to do had the building been on fire. Just die? Have a kind soul carry them? With most people wfh at least a couple of days per week, this seems really dangerous for anyone who might get stranded.
The building manager should (and may be legally required to) have a fire department approved emergency plan that specifically addresses this question. Usually, the plan will be for you to await rescue.
A modern, up-to-code high rise building will have designated “places of refuge” that are designed to withstand heat and smoke, such as a pressurized stairwell with fire doors. In older buildings that don’t have something like that, the plan might call for disabled people to go to the nearest (unprotected) stairway, or it might call for them to remain in their office/apartment and “defend in place”. If possible, call 911 (or equivalent) to notify rescuers of your location.
I’ve been to a few older office towers where the plan was basically “in the event of a fire, people who can’t walk down stairs will die horribly, so those people are not allowed above the ground floor.”
Having a coworker with one leg, it meant a lot of shuffling meetings around to get the meeting room on the ground floor, but they were very meticulous about it.
That’s not a terrible emergency plan honestly
Kind of limits their upward mobility, I would imagine.
And I absolutely intended the double entendre, because I can see how that could limit the ability to get into more executive positions, if the ceo or vp is required to come to the ground floor in order to talk to them, instead of two doors down the hall.
Maybe in a better society the CEO wouldn’t be a shiny rarity who can only exist in the topmost floor, as far away from lower employees as possible.
I know the discussion goes much deeper than that, but, y’know.
Ok but it’d also be awkward if the ceo can’t visit other floors
Sorry, I can’t tell if that’s a really funny joke, or an actually serious point.
It’s kinda both. Like it’s humorous, but also a lot of the frustrations of disability are. It’s funny to think about but it must be infuriating to actually reach the top of your career potential not because you can’t do the jobs, not because you aren’t willing to put in the work, and not because people aren’t willing to give you a shot, but because the board of directors meets on a high up floor and the fire code says it’s too dangerous for you to not be on the ground floor. You probably prepared for a lot of frustration and limitations by not being able to walk, I know my own disability has taught me that, but you probably didn’t think that was one of the dreams you don’t get to have.
When I worked in a high rise we had floor fire wardens per office, and we had to have a plan on who would carry injured or otherwise immobile people down the stairs. I had an ankle surgery at one point and had a designated carrier, and a secondary for when they were out of office.
…architect here: we design protected areas of refuge where mobilty-impared occupants can shelter in place until emergency services arrive to evacuate them from the facility…
…you’ll often see areas of refuge identified near elevator lobbies and equipped with hardened callboxes for emergency communication, or marked on the evacuation plan if they’re in a remote location…sometimes areas of refuge are pretty subtle if you don’t know to look for them: we design protected firewalls, structure, and building systems integrated into the facility so the biggest tells are usually callboxes, magnetic door hold-opens, or tracks for automatic fire curtains…
…when renovating older facilities, we do the best we can to modernise life safety within the limitations of existing infrastructure, but the general rule of thumb is that as long as you’ve improved upon what
originallypreviously existed, you’ve satisfied your obligation even if it’s not at parity with new construction…(it’s not uncommon for old facilities to have gone through a dozen or more life-safety modernisations since the advent of modern building codes, just palimpsested one-over-the-other as standards progressed)
Palimpsested
Holy word of the day, Batman!
Thanks so much for the info. I’m curious if you know about when these practices became common. The building I’m in for work, for example, has carpet in the hallways that looks like it was installed in the late 90s-2000s. The style of the outside seems to fit this range. Would you expect to see some, most, or all of these techniques in a building from that era? (This is in Cali, so likely early to apply the regulations I would think.)
In my workplace, there are a few options: When a disabled person is on a certain floor above ground floor, there will be a special chair they can be put in, that allows one person to maneuver them down the fire escape. Multiple people in the company are trained on the use of this contraption and are notified before the evacuation is necessary.
When there are more wheelchair bound people in the building than there are evacuation chairs available, they’ll have to be taken to the fire escape behind double fireproof doors, where the area is pressurized with clean air. There the firemen will evacuate them.
A third option is the area where the elevators are. It closes automatically and has a fireproof door where you can wait in front of the elevators for the firemen to evacuate you using the elevators (or otherwise).
Normally there aren’t that many wheelchair bound people in the building that need those chairs, because visitors are normally confined to the ground floor. On a floor where a disabled person used to work (now retired), one of those chairs was permanently available.
Edit: the ones we have resemble these https://evac-chair.com/
These things are absolutely terrifying btw. There’s much better options out there. I never realized until I had the chance to ride one during a practice, I replaced every single one of them for our company after that for evacuation mattresses.
Good on you, that thing looks terrifying to sit in. I guess a fire is pretty good motivation to strap into the damn thing but it doesn’t look safe at all. I was expecting like sled tracks with a triple wheeled axle that would have some kind of hand break to keep it from free sledding down the stairs and stop entirely if released.
It’s kinda hard to explain, but you need to kinda push it down the stairs. The tracks have loads of resistance, providing it’s maintained properly. I don’t think it’s unsafe with proper maintenance, but the experience of sitting in that chair surely makes you question if you’re absolutely sure about that. You can’t see the tracks from where you’re sitting, and your legs just dangle above a height you perceive as 2+ meters because of the slope of the stairs and the incline of the chair. And then the person behind you actively pushes you into that, making you instinctively react to an incoming free fall.
Also in a fire or any other evacuation it’s very important you stay calm. You’re not gonna stay calm in this. I’m not scared easily but even I fucking hated it. Let alone someone thats wounded and scared to begin with.
I don’t know how many facility managers are here, but get an evac mattress. It’s cheaper and doesn’t need maintenance and is infinitely user Friendly.
It’s 2024, why in the hell is nobody designing skyscrapers with fun slides spiraling all the way to the bottom?
…exit slides were common fire escapes in the 1950s and you can still find abandoned hatches in some older buildings, but in my experiences renovating aged facilities they’ve all been sealed-off (and signs removed) during life-safety modernisations over the past seventy years…
…they’re pretty dangerous by modern standards so alternatives are always preferred, similar to old abandoned exterior fire escapes…
Waiting for the day someone busts down a closet wall in their 16th floor condo to find a section of a slide and post it on social media asking what it is.
One thing I haven’t seen in the thread yet, is that there ARE elevators which are intended for use during fire-related evacuations. I’ve been in buildings where signs by the elevators make it known that during evacuations you are SUPPOSED to use them.
I don’t know the specifics, but I would assume these have self-monitoring sensors to allow the elevator control system to determine whether it is affected by whatever is going on.
I suspect the way they work also changes, instead of prioritizing getting around different floors, the computer would start shuttling them up and down specifically to get people from each floor down to ground level. No-one already in the elevator gets to pick what floor they’re going to.
Modern buildings are constructed in a way that significantly slows the spread of a fire, and I would assume that the machinery and shaft of evacuation elevators, doubly so.
And same as any elevator, they are built using a level of redundancy that means several cables can fail without issue, as well as emergency brakes that arrest the fall of the cabin should the worst occur.
this seems really dangerous for anyone who might get stranded.
I’d take a step back and say no, this isn’t actually as bad as some of the comments seem to suggest.
The vast, vast majority of building emergencies are safe to shelter in place. Modern building codes generally prevent fires from spreading too far, and isolate smoke to a specific place in the building.
Then, for certain types of catastrophic disasters, being able bodied doesn’t actually help, as people can still get stuck and need rescue from firefighters anyway.
You need some kind of disaster Goldilocks zone where things are bad enough to where quick evacuation is helpful and things aren’t so bad that evacuation isn’t feasible, before it starts making a difference.
And in those situations, many buildings do have evacuation chairs in the stairwells. And stronger people can assist carrying down the stairs, too. There are a lot of variations on two-person or single person carries that depend on exactly what mobility limitation there is. If you live or work with or around people with mobility issues, it’s worth looking them up, maybe taking a first aid/survival class or something.
They told Grenfell Tower residents to stay in their rooms as well.
That did not go well.
They would have been fine if the building had actually been designed properly but because it hadn’t been designed properly a lot of deaths occurred. Staying in your room is a good tactic if you’re in a well-designed building because they will contain the fire to a single.
The trouble is you don’t know if you are in a safe designed building, or if you’re in the building designed by an idiot, built by the lowest bidder and coated in paraffin wall paneling for aesthetic effect.
What a depressing thread. Fuck people who can’t walk I guess.
We required (pretty sure it was fire code) designated people to carry immobile people down the stairs.
Is it like security or just random employees? I wonder if they require people to stay in shape, otherwise they might find themselves unable in an emergency.
just a random employee. We could volunteer. And we had drills all the time.
At my office each stairwell has a riding chair at the top. It’s only three stories though.
I used to work in a school with disabled kids, so I did a few fire drills.
As other people here have said, there are areas like stairwells where the kids with mobility issues waited (with adults, of course!) during fire alarms. Fire crews would’ve been told about us and come and got those kids first in the event of an actual emergency.
there are areas like stairwells where the kids with mobility issues waited (with adults, of course!)
Lol imagine if the adults were like “ok good, you stay here, I’m out, bye”
Usually the evacuation plan includes people with wheel chairs going into the stairwells. Stairwells can withstand fire longer than the rest of the building. And, yes, there are usually people designated to carry or help those with mobility issues.
I can help carry an old fashioned wheelchair down a staircase, but fancy electric ones can weigh hundreds of kilos.
An evacuation chair seems like a much better solution there.
In an evacuation, the chair is left behind.
