Enhancing Egress Drills: Preparation and Assessment of Evacuee Performance

This article explores how egress drills-specifically those related to fire incidents-are currently used, their impact on safety levels, and the insights gained from them. It is suggested that neither the merits of egress drills are well understood, nor the impact on egress performance well characterized. In addition, the manner in which they are conducted varies both between and within regulatory jurisdictions. By investigating their strengths and limitations, this article suggests opportunities for their enhancement possibly through the use of other egress models to support and expand upon the benefits provided. It is by no means suggested that drills are not important to evacuation safety-only that their inconsistent use and the interpretation of the results produced may mean we (as researchers, practitioners, regulators, and stakeholders) are not getting the maximum benefit out of this important tool

The impact of a change on the size of the smoke compartment in the evacuation of health care facilities

Evacuation in health-care facilities is complex due to the physical impairment of the patients. This kind of evacuation usually requires the assistance of the workforce members. A proposed change of NFPA 101, Life Safety Code, would increase the maximum allowable size of a smoke compartment (a space within the building enclosed by smoke barriers on all sides that restricts the movement of smoke) in health-care occupancies from 2090 m2 to 3700 m2, almost double the size. This study aims to analyse the impact of this change in the required time for evacuating patients during a fire in order to understand the consequences of that potential change. This paper is focused on the area where the patient?s rooms are located. The evacuation scenario is a floor plan comprised of four smoke compartments. To analyse the proposed change, the smoke barriers between two adjacent compartments were removed in a floor plan and three ratios of number of patients per one staff member were considered (4:1, 3:1 and 2:1). A computational methodology was conducted to calibrate the model STEPS for simulating assisted evacuation processes. In addition, Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) was used to simulate the fire and smoke spread in a table and a PC to compare fire and evacuation results The evacuation results show that the change of the smoke compartment size increases the mean evacuation time by 23%; however, the fire results show that the available safe egress time is 16 min for both smaller and large smoke compartment. The ratio of the number of patients per staff member is also a strong factor that increases the evacuation up to 82% when comparing the ratios of 2 patients per staff member and 4 patients per staff member

The simulation of wildland-urban interface fire evacuation: The WUI-NITY platform

Wildfires are a significant safety risk to populations adjacent to wildland areas, known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI). This paper introduces a modelling platform called WUI-NITY. The platform is built on the Unity3D game engine and simulates and visualises human behaviour and wildfire spread during an evacuation of WUI communities. The purpose of this platform is to enhance the situational awareness of responders and residents during evacuation scenarios by providing information on the dynamic evolution of the emergency. WUI-NITY represents current and predicted conditions by coupling the three key modelling layers of wildfire evacuation, namely the fire, pedestrian, and traffic movement. This allows predictions of evacuation behaviour over time. The current version of WUI-NITY demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of coupling the modelling layers. Its wildfire modelling layer is based on FARSITE, the pedestrian layer implements a dedicated pedestrian response and movement model, and the traffic layer includes a traffic evacuation model based on the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model. The platform also includes a sub-model called PERIL that designs the spatial location of trigger buffers. The main contribution of this work is in the development of a modular and model-agnostic (i.e., not linked to a specific model) platform with consistent levels of granularity (allowing a comparable modelling resolution in the representation of each layer) in all three modelling layers. WUI-NITY is a powerful tool to protect against wildfires; it can enable education and training of communities, forensic studies of past evacuations and dynamic vulnerability assessment of ongoing emergencies

Studying the Impact of Trained Staff on Evacuation Scenarios by Agent-Based Simulation

Human evacuation experiments can trigger distress, be unethical and present high costs. As a solution, computer simulations can predict the effectiveness of new emergency management procedures. This paper applies multi-agent simulation to measure the influence of staff members with diverse training levels on evacuation time. A previously developed and validated model was extended with explicit mechanisms to simulate staff members helping people to egress. The majority of parameter settings have been based on empirical data acquired in earlier studies. Therefore, simulation results are expected to be realistic. Results show that staff are more effective in complex environments, especially when trained. Not only specialised security professionals but, especially, regular workers of shopping facilities and offices play a significant role in evacuation processes when adequately trained. These results can inform policy makers and crowd managers on new emergency management procedures

An open multi-physics framework for modelling wildland-urban interface fire evacuations

Fire evacuations at wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to the emergency services, and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. This paper presents a multi-physics framework for the simulation of evacuation in WUI wildfire incidents, including three main modelling layers: wildfire, pedestrians, and traffic. Currently, these layers have been mostly modelled in isolation and there is no comprehensive model which accounts for their integration. The key features needed for system integration are identified, namely: consistent level of refinement of each layer (i.e. spatial and temporal scales) and their application (e.g. evacuation planning or emergency response), and complete data exchange. Timelines of WUI fire events are analysed using an approach similar to building fire engineering (available vs. required safe egress times for WUI fires, i.e. WASET/WRSET). The proposed framework allows for a paradigm shift from current wildfire risk assessment and mapping tools towards dynamic fire vulnerability mapping. This is the assessment of spatial and temporal vulnerabilities based on the wildfire threat evolution along with variables related to the infrastructure, population and network characteristics. This framework allows for the integration of the three main modelling layers affecting WUI fire evacuation and aims at improving the safety of WUI communities by minimising the consequences of wildfire evacuations

e-Sanctuary: Open Multi-Physics Framework for Modelling Wildfire Urban Evacuation

The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit