Analysis of a Change in Upward Escape Walking Speed in a High-rise Building under Fire Condition

This paper is a preceding study carried out in order to set up fire safety standards on the design of Refuge Areas or emergency staircases for evacuees and fire-fighters. Initially, one high-rise apartment building was selected as the subject for the trial escape experiment, with 334 invited participants acting under the assumption that there is a fire emergency. Next this study analyzed the participants escape speed and behavior by recording them with CCTVs. As a building gets higher, the length of escape route gets longer and hence more time is needed to evacuate. In a high-rise building, people might go upstairs in case of a fire in order to reach the ground through a refuge area or bridge connected with another evacuation route. Fire fighters holding fire equipment might also go upward through an emergency staircase because a fire truck may not be tall enough to reach a fire in a high-rise building. Architects and fire engineers carry out Performance Based Design (PBD), a method of ensuring occupants' safety by predicting various fire scenarios using computer simulation or engineering methods. However computer simulations do not always agree with actual circumstances and there are possible differences due to certain critical points, they do not reflect the actual behavior, escape speed, response or thoughts of the occupants. To overcome these critical points, this study selected a 30-story high-rise apartment building in Korea and executed a simulated evacuation experiment with 319 invited participants assuming that they would escape upward under a downstairs fire situation. Here you should insert the short abstract for your paper.