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.
Ya beats burning to death…
places of refuge
Ohh so that’s what that means. I see those signs on the stairwells of my office building and wasn’t sure what it actually meant.
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.
To add to this, modern commercial buildings are built with specifically engineered “fire partitions” throughout the structure, such as stairwells and egress pathways. In the most critical areas these are usually 2 or 3 hour rated, meaning that they are designed to withstand a structural fire for 2 to 3 hours before becoming compromised.
In America at least, modern commercial construction is exceptionally fire-resistant.
Source: I build hospitals.
This makes a lot of sense. There’s a person in our building who has a limitation in his movement who I noticed works on the first floor. I only saw him going into the building (rather than out) once, but he entered a space on the first floor and a security guard held the door for him. I wondered, at the time, if that was a deliberate accommodation: if someone who can’t operate a heavy door works right next to the security checkpoint, there will always be someone available to hold it for them. Thanks!
My university used to have a bag thing that was made to slide people down the stairs.
They repeatedly asked me if it would require it in case of emergency but since arthritis makes walking painful but not impossible, especially when adrenaline kicks in and my choices are pain or a fiery death, I never had to practice with the thing.
My high-school was build against a hill luckily but since some of the evacuation included leaving through the windows if the hallway is on fire I’m assuming the idea was to lift disabled people through it.
We die.
When I was in engineering school, I was lucky enough to have a based professor. He would start lessons by describing a tragedy. A paraplegic burns to death in a stairwell, another cracks their skull after being pushed down the stairs. He would then show us solutions to these issues from long before the tragedy. Slides to carry you down, bags you sit in and use the rails as a slide. Fire safe rooms that you could shelter in and can be accessed from the outside.
This also does not simply affect us disabled fucks. Say there is an earthquake, and you shatter a leg, or worse, your hip. You are now in the same stairwell as the rest of us.
Also, god help you if you’re overweight. When my legs stopped working, I gained 200lbs. I knew then and know now that if I am in a burning building, I will be the last one out, if I get out.
They could design the stairwell like in a cartoon so that the steps go diagonal to make the entire thing a one-way slide.
Then you can go wheeee! during a fire escape.
Emergency slides are a thing at some places, unfortunately usually only in places that focus on people with disabilities. I was at a vocational school that focused on people with disabilities for my training as a programmer, and all the buildings had spiral slides in the stairwells. The bonus was that you could also just use them as slides when moving down.
We are getting closer to the Futurama future where everyone gets around using pneumatic tubes.
I’ve not ever worked in one place that had both good “fire marshal” training and had an emergency chair for escaping. I was one of those volunteering to be responsible for helping a buddy escape, yet I never even saw the chair. They described how to use it. We even got tours of all the emergency equipment to gain familiarity, except that.
Since then, no place I’ve worked with have even had a Fire Marshall program
Then just open the standpipes (for safety 😜 ) and turn them into water slides!
As an able overweight guy, if I get hurt or something there’s no way anyone is helping me get out in an emergency.
Former firefighter here: myself and my colleagues worked very hard on our strength and fitness. Dragging a person who weighs 250 + lbs over carpet , while wearing gear+ scba is the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done. I thought my heart was going to explode once I got to the yard and I only moved from the back to the front (plus some turns) of a residence before I got helped.
Which especially sucks as 250 for anyone over 6’ is barely above average. At my peak, I was 320
My university had those bags. I found them… Optimistic
Im just glad they acknowledged us. Like, even the degrading alleyway wheelchair ramps are better than a staircase with no handrail, but at least they put in the literal minimum effort. Same goes with cloth masks.
Honestly I agree. And I don’t consider them degrading if the purpose is to save your life. I find it humbling (maybe nowthe right word) that the plan is to have multiple people work together just to make sure you don’t get left behind. But in an emergency you do need multiple people’s help which is why I find them so optimistic.
I’m also happy I don’t have to use them or practice with them. It doesn’t seem very comfortable and honestly a bit scary.
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.
Yea, they meant carry the person. I guess don’t be disabled and fat.
“Hold my beer”
-Carson Briere, college douchebag who threw a wheelchair down a staircase
I was the safety contact for my office in a high rise and had to prepare for drills and thus is what we were taught.
During the final sweep of the offices we were especially looking for anyone with any mobility or other issues and escorting them to the stairwell.
…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.)
…that’d take a deep dive into obsolete building codes to identify exactly when the concept was first introduced: BOCA, southern/standard, and uniform building codes all merged into IBC about twenty-five years ago so we’re talking about old paper code books from twentieth century…
…areas of refuge are closely tied to modern accessibility standards which arose from the ADA in 1990; i’m guessing they were widely introduced sometime in that decade, possibly earlier for high-rises or hazardous occupancies, but they were definitely part of 1997 UBC (which most of california enforced) and 2000 IBC…
(i started working professionally in 1993 and every project i worked on was fully accessible, but adoption varied across different jurisdictions and when i worked in california a decade later they were waaaay less accessible than texas)
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”
Sounds like the Uvalde police force!
“I don’t wanna go inside, there’s fire in there!”
I think they didn’t even go inside because scared.
I may have pretended to do this as a joke once or twice.
That’s part of my job. Our district covers several cities, so several different fire departments. Some have suggested meeting spots on each floor. Some have provided slings. Our schools all have evac chairs. They suck and they’re dangerous. If you can have someone carry your chair,someone else block traffic, and one or both of them help you back into your chair afterwards bottom bumping down the stairs is what i would do. Otherwise, go to the meeting spot.
We had a few evac chairs, but I think you needed training to use them and I never had the training!
…i have a paraplegic friend who’s surprisingly adept at wheely-ing his own chair down fire stairs and a quadriplegic friend who we just hodor outside during fire drills, even though they’re both supposed to shelter-in-place…
It’s 2024, why in the hell is nobody designing skyscrapers with fun slides spiraling all the way to the bottom?
McDonald’s PlayScraper
…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.
Concepts exist. Not sure if any are being used other than as a meme though.
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.
We have a different brand, but otherwise comparable. During our training and practice, we did a few runs with volunteers and also with the colleague who was wheelchair bound. While it does feel a bit weird the first time, it doesn’t feel unsafe to sit in, and also when operating it, you feel like in control without too much effort.
During our evacuations, everybody remains calm, and everything remains orderly and coordinated. I have to admit we never had an evacuation with fire and smoke near the people, but with the early warnings we get, that’s unlikely to happen. The building was designed with good compartmentalisation, so even when there’s a fire, the smoke shouldn’t spread too far.
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.
Haha, you did a really good job explaining how incredibly unnerving that would be. Just staring off a cliff of pain while somebody actively pushes you infinitely further off the ledge with no control over your own fate.
Edit: even the guy on the website looks like he’s questioning his decision to get strapped in for the picture
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.
And until one of them burns down and kills 80-odd people, nobody really cares to check.
Yup, Grenfell was one of two disasters that I had in mind in my answer, that was bad enough that able bodied people needed firefighter rescues (or where rescue was futile and they were basically doomed from the start).
I take it 9/11 is the other one?
Yeah. Top floors doomed from the start, but a wheelchair-bound person on the 69th floor was safely evacuated. This link says that 5 people were saved using this evacuation chair.
Yeah I was thinking 9/11 too when you described that getting out early is good, but (non top floor) is unlikely to have injured anyone.
I’m glad that they were able to escape
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.
The exceptions are surprising. In my region, they’ve approved wood buildings up to 12 storeys . Isn’t that scary as hell? Just in general, I mean; but also needing to escape 12 storeys in 3 minutes before fire consumes its favourite food? Super scary.
I think that’s only possible with laminated wood, and apparently it’s made thick and dense enough that fire affects it more slowly than normal. From my understanding it’s a safe building material.
It requires safe design principles to address the specific concerns with timber/wood construction, but some places are starting to do the research to show how wood can be made safe. This interview with a fire safety engineer talks about the state of the industry in different regulatory jurisdictions.
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.
I believe there should be slide sheets/ sleds and/or evacuation chairs in place for this.
Yes, we had a lot of fun with those at our last fire drill.
I saw one place that had a dedicated device in the stairway that was meant to help carry wheelchair bound people down the stairs.
Something like this IIRC https://siamagazin.com/the-mobile-stairlift-a-portable-stair-climbing-wheelchair/
I work in a nursing home. This is what we have for this exact situation.
…we used unpowered dollies of similar design for moving large appliances back when i was a groundskeeper…
At my office each stairwell has a riding chair at the top. It’s only three stories though.
I don’t know, but my boss promised me that if there was a fire, she’d carry me down the stairs.
… You know, if there’s time.
What a depressing thread. Fuck people who can’t walk I guess.
There’s not exactly a whole lot of options…
They shelter in designated spaces built to withstand fire longer, typically stairwells, and fire departments rescue them.
I know but if there was enough caring, a solution could be made.
Such as?
I just said I don’t know. I’m not an engineer or an architect.
Evacuation chairs that can be used by one trained able person. You just need to have a plan in place to make sure the chairs and trained personnel are actually available where needed.
One solution my friend and I came up with is a cardboard box, lay on it, drag them down the stairs. You drag them head first, on their back, and laying straight. It’s painful, but they’ll live. The idea is to sort of glide down the steps. We tried it out and it worked, but it hurt.
Why head first though?
Depends on how much cake you have I guess. Our cheeks and heels kept catching steps and there wasn’t enough rigidity. Going head first seemed to glide down the stair more easily.
We didn’t try with a box though, so maybe adding the box would enable feet first
Oh that’s a very good point.
I was wondering the same. Best guess I could come up with was that it meant the people assisting the person on the cardboard would be able to hold them by the feet and, standing on the higher steps, gradually slide them down in a controlled manner. Just a guess though.
It was more to do with shoulders having a more gradual curve than heels and cheeks. We didn’t try it with a box, but speculate that the box would make this less of an issue. The box idea came from sliding down the stairs as a kid
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.
I’ve seen contraptions to carry people down stairs. These were meant to be carried by two able people.
Or two able people might just have to carry a disabled person down the stairs without a contraption.
I hope I’m remembering this right. Sounds humiliating but also problematic if people aren’t trained to do this and/or leave the building without knowing or caring.
