Refuge & Accessible Egress

The escape strategies so far quietly assumed something dangerous: that everyone can walk, quickly, down a flight of stairs. Many people cannot. Wheelchair users and people with mobility impairments, but also people with visual or hearing impairments, older people, people with temporary injuries, pregnant women, and parents with small children - a real building's population is not a crowd of able-bodied adults, and a life-safety strategy that works only for them is not a life-safety strategy.

The problem sharpens in multi-storey buildings because of a hard fact: passenger lifts are normally not used for escape in a fire. An ordinary lift can be called to the fire floor, lose power and trap its occupants, or act as a smoke-filled shaft - so the standard instruction is to use the stairs, and lifts are recalled and taken out of service. That instruction is sound for most people and deadly for someone who cannot use stairs. If the plan offers them nothing else, it has designed them to be left behind - which is both a moral failure and, increasingly, a legal one under accessibility and equality duties.

So accessible egress is not a special-case add-on; it is part of getting the means of escape right for the actual occupants. The principle is that every occupant must have a means of reaching safety, even if - for someone who cannot descend a stair unaided - that means is different: a safe place to wait plus assisted escape, a lift specifically designed and protected for evacuation, or moving horizontally into an adjacent safe compartment rather than down.

This is an area where architecture, fire engineering, accessibility law and building management all meet, and where an architect must both design the physical provision and recognise the limits of competence - the detailed solutions for a complex or tall building belong with a fire engineer and an accessibility specialist. It also ties directly to the Universal & Accessible Design course: inclusive egress is the life-safety face of inclusive design. What does not vary is the duty: nobody is designed to be abandoned on an upper floor.

A refuge (or refuge area) is the core architectural provision for someone who cannot immediately escape down a stair. It is a place, usually on a protected stair landing or within a protected lobby, where a person can wait in relative safety - sheltered from fire and smoke by fire-resisting construction - until they can descend with help or be assisted out. A refuge buys the thing that matters most: time out of danger, spent somewhere the fire cannot quickly reach.

A refuge is not just a painted rectangle. To work it needs to be genuinely protected (part of the fire-resisting enclosure, not an open corner of a smoky corridor), large enough to hold a wheelchair (and ideally more than one) without obstructing the escape of others flowing past - the refuge sits clear of the line of travel, not blocking it - and it needs a way to call for help: two-way emergency communication so the waiting person can tell responders where they are and know that assistance is coming. Waiting alone with no way to summon help, and no knowledge whether anyone is coming, is its own terror; the communication is part of the safety.

Crucially, a refuge is a temporary stage, not a final destination. The strategy cannot be 'wait here and hope the fire service arrives' - it must connect to a definite means of onward escape: assisted descent, an evacuation lift, or movement to another compartment. A refuge with no plan for what happens next is only a comfortable place to be trapped.

How many refuges, their size, the communication required, and when they are mandated are code and standards matters that vary by building and jurisdiction - verify against the current NBC 2016 Part 4, the relevant accessibility provisions and the AHJ. The design principle is firm: where people may be unable to self-evacuate, give them a protected place to wait that is out of everyone's way and connected to help and onward escape.

From the refuge, three broad strategies get a person who cannot use stairs the rest of the way to safety. The first is assisted escape down the stair - trained staff bringing the person down with equipment such as an evacuation chair, a device designed to descend stairs safely. This depends on people and training as much as hardware: someone must be responsible, present and practised, which makes it a management question as much as a design one (Module 9).

The second is the evacuation lift - a lift specifically designed, protected and powered to be used for escape, unlike an ordinary passenger lift. It sits in a protected shaft, has a secure backup power supply and controls that let it keep running under fire conditions, and is managed so it can bring people down safely. (A firefighting lift is a related but distinct thing for the fire service.) An evacuation lift is a significant engineering provision, not a normal lift relabelled - and which buildings need one, and how it must be built, are matters for the code and a fire engineer.

The third is progressive horizontal evacuation - instead of going down, people move sideways through a fire-resisting wall into an adjacent compartment that is not on fire, and wait or continue there. This is the backbone of escape in hospitals and care homes, where many occupants cannot be moved down stairs quickly (Module 8.3): you buy safety by crossing a compartment line, not by descending. It depends entirely on sound compartmentation (Module 4).

Which of these a building uses depends on its type, height, occupancy and the people in it, and the choice and detailing belong with a fire engineer and accessibility specialist on anything beyond the simple. The unifying idea is that the stair is not the only way to safety: you can wait protected and be helped down, ride a properly engineered evacuation lift, or move horizontally to safety - and a good strategy plans which, for whom, in advance.

Inclusive egress is designed in two layers: the physical provision you draw, and the human plan that uses it. On the physical side, think about accessible egress from the first sketch alongside the rest of the means of escape - locate refuges at the protected stairs, keep accessible routes to them step-free and wide enough, decide early whether the building's height and use call for an evacuation lift or horizontal evacuation, and make sure the accessible entrance is not the only accessible way out. Retrofitting refuge and assisted escape into a frozen plan is far harder than designing it in, just like every other part of egress.

On the human side, physical provision is only half the answer. Real buildings use personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs) for occupants who need assistance - an individual plan agreed with the person: where they go, who helps, what equipment, how they communicate. For visitors and varied public buildings, a general plan and trained, available staff take that role. This is building management (Module 9), but the architect must design a building in which such plans are possible - the refuge, the communication, the evacuation lift or horizontal route have to be there for any plan to work.

Involve disabled people and accessibility expertise in the thinking rather than designing for an imagined user - the lived experience of how evacuation actually works (or fails) is information you do not otherwise have, and it is the heart of the Universal & Accessible Design approach this links to. Treat dignity as part of safety: being carried as an afterthought, or left waiting with no word, is a failure even if the person survives.

The binding requirements - when refuges, evacuation lifts or horizontal evacuation are required, their specifications, and the accessibility duties - must be verified against the current NBC 2016 Part 4, India's accessibility provisions and the AHJ, with a fire engineer and accessibility specialist on any complex building. The principle to hold: an escape plan that does not work for everyone in the building is not finished.