Lifts for evacuation—human behaviour considerations

SUMMARY To predict the time that a building will take to be evacuated in an emergency and to design lift systems capable of dealing with the demand, building designers need an understanding of the likely exiting behaviour of occupants. Because of the inherent difficulties of carrying out research in human behaviour, a number of approaches have been used in this investigation, including analysis of data from past fire events and a number of surveys. The results from this work suggest that the split of occupants using the stairs or lifts to evacuate is governed predominantly by floor level of the occupant and that it is unreasonable to expect that occupants will wait indefinitely for a lift to arrive in an emergency situation. The drop‐off in the percentage of occupants that will continue to wait for a lift with increasing waiting time is dependent on floor height. These results will allow building designers to make more realistic assumptions when designing evacuation strategies incorporating lifts. It is also hoped that a better understanding of the reservations that building users may have about using lifts for evacuation in emergency situations will allow better occupant training programmes to be developed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.