Evacuation & Refuge

We spend most of a career on arrival - the level threshold, the ramp, the wide door, the lift up. We spend far too little on the reverse journey under stress. Yet an accessible building that a disabled person cannot leave safely in an emergency is only half-designed, and the missing half is the half that can kill. Egress is the mirror image of access, and it must be designed with the same seriousness and at the same early stage.

The difficulty is an asymmetry built into how buildings behave in a fire. On an ordinary day, a wheelchair user rides the passenger lift to the fourth floor; the moment the alarm sounds, that lift returns to the ground and parks, because an ordinary lift shaft can act as a chimney and its power cannot be trusted. The able-bodied crowd streams down the protected stair. The wheelchair user, the person with a heart condition who cannot manage four flights, the blind person navigating smoke and a panicking crowd - each meets a route that assumed a fit, sighted, unaided body moving fast on foot. The route in was universal; the route out quietly was not.

The response is not to treat these occupants as a problem to be carried, but to design a genuine accessible means of escape: a continuous protected route that a disabled person can use, or wait safely within, until help arrives or the situation is managed. That means thinking about escape as a system with several honest options - horizontal escape to another fire compartment on the same level, a place of relative safety to wait, assisted descent, and in some buildings an evacuation lift - rather than pretending everyone can simply walk down. Horizontal escape is often the unsung hero here: moving through a fire-resisting wall into an adjoining compartment on the same floor buys time and dignity without a single stair, and in large single-storey and healthcare buildings it may be the primary strategy. As with all the numbers in this course, the principle is universal and the binding specifics are not: escape distances, compartment sizes and the acceptability of any given strategy are set by your fire code and your fire engineer, and by an access consultant working alongside them. Design the intent early - every occupant has a safe way out or a safe place to wait - and let the specialists size it.

For multi-storey buildings, the workhorse of accessible escape is the refuge - a protected space, usually on a stair landing within a fire-resisting enclosure, where a person who cannot use the stairs unaided can wait in relative safety for assisted evacuation. A refuge is not a place to abandon someone; it is a designed pause in the escape sequence, protected from fire and smoke for a defined period, from which the person is helped down or, if the situation resolves, walks the rest.

Three things make a refuge work, and all three are design decisions. First, space that does not block others: a refuge must hold a wheelchair user (a common figure is a clear space of roughly 900 by 1400 mm, verify against your local standard) positioned so that it does not obstruct the flow of people still using the stair. A refuge that narrows the escape stair for everyone else is a failure twice over. Second, protection: the enclosure must resist fire and smoke long enough for the evacuation strategy to play out, which ties the refuge into the building's compartmentation. Third - and most neglected - communication. A person waiting in a refuge must be able to tell someone they are there and hear that help is coming; a two-way emergency voice communication system (often called an EVC) turns a frightening, silent wait into a managed one. Signage, contrast and lighting matter too: the refuge must be findable in poor visibility and clearly marked as a refuge, not mistaken for a store.

> A refuge without communication is just a nicer place to be forgotten. The intercom is not an accessory - it is the point.

Refuges are widely required by fire and accessibility codes for buildings above a certain height or occupancy, but the exact triggers, dimensions, fire-resistance periods and communication requirements vary by jurisdiction and change over time. Provide the intent generously and early - protected waiting space at each upper level, sized not to obstruct, wired to communicate - and confirm the binding figures with your fire engineer and access consultant. Locate refuges where people naturally go under stress: at the protected stair, on the accessible route, signed the way the exit is signed.

A refuge answers where do I wait; it does not answer how do I get down. There are three broad answers, and good buildings often combine them.

The first is the evacuation lift. This is not an ordinary passenger lift and not the same thing as a firefighters' lift, though the categories overlap in some codes. An evacuation lift is a lift specifically designed and managed to keep working during an evacuation: it sits within a protected shaft and lobby, has a secure or backup power supply, and is operated under a defined procedure rather than left to ordinary call buttons. Where the building type and height justify it, an evacuation lift is by far the most dignified and reliable way to get non-ambulant people down, and it should be considered from the first section, because the protected shaft, lobby and power route are architecture, not fit-out. Whether one is required or merely wise is a fire-engineering judgement for your jurisdiction.

The second is assisted descent by evacuation chair - a specialised chair, usually stored in or near the refuge, that trained staff use to take a person down a stair under control. Evacuation chairs are relatively cheap and can be retrofitted, which makes them the fallback in existing buildings, but they depend entirely on trained, available people, and they are not suitable for every person or every impairment. Storing a chair and never training anyone to use it is theatre, not safety.

The third is horizontal escape and defend-in-place, mentioned earlier: moving to an adjoining compartment or, in hospitals and some care settings, a strategy of staying put in a well-compartmented, sprinklered building while the fire is contained. This shifts the emphasis from moving vulnerable people to making the building itself hold the line - a legitimate and sometimes safer approach, decided by the fire strategy for that building type.

No single answer fits every building. The design task is to choose a coherent strategy early, provide the space and services it needs, and never leave a floor with no honest route down for someone who cannot take the stairs.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that separates real accessible egress from a box-ticked drawing: the physical design only works if it is matched by a plan and by people. A refuge with an intercom that no one answers, an evacuation lift no one is trained to operate, a chair no one can lift - each is a design that failed at the last metre because the human system around it was never built.

The tool that joins design to reality is the Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan (PEEP) - an individual, agreed procedure for how a specific disabled person will leave a specific building, developed with that person, not for them. A PEEP names the route, the refuge, who assists, how communication happens, and what equipment is used. For buildings where the occupants are not known in advance - a shopping centre, a station, a museum - a General Emergency Evacuation Plan (GEEP) sets out how staff will assist any disabled visitor who needs it. Both belong in the fire strategy and both need the physical design to support them: you cannot write a workable PEEP for a floor that has no refuge.

For you as a designer, three habits make the difference. Design the strategy and the management together, ideally with the fire engineer and access consultant in the room from concept - the refuge, the lift, the compartment lines and the plan are one system. Make the escape route as legible and forgiving as the entrance route: contrast on the escape stair, tactile and visual information, lighting that survives a power cut, signage that reads in smoke and stress. And never sign off egress you would not trust for yourself or someone you love - walk the reverse journey as a wheelchair user, a blind person, an older person with a bad hip, exactly as you learned to walk the entrance in Lesson 0.1's workshop. Getting out is not the fire officer's problem you inherit at the end; it is a first-sketch design intention, and it is squarely yours.