Homework Question on Fire Evacuation and Multi-use High-rise Buildings
- Write 2 separated pages:
- For the first page, What can be done to lessen the pre-movement time associated with evacuation?
- The second page: Multi-use highrise buildings are appearing with increasing frequency and pose interesting decisions for design professionals and regulatory authorities.
- Assume you are responsible for reviewing the design for such a large building. How would you approach the problem of setting requirements when there are multiple types of occupancies in the same building?
- The problem is not as simple as requiring fire-rated partitions between the different types of occupancies within the same building. Many of the issues concern human and organizational factors. Especially important is how the occupancies interact regarding exiting requirements.
- What if a building has an assembly occupancy on it’s second floor. Would you permit the theater patrons to leave using the main building entrance?
- If you required that most of the patrons leave using exits dedicated to the theater, how would you assure that they would use those exits instead of the main entrance?
- Please make sure the 2 pages are not related
Homework Answer on Fire Evacuation and Multi-use High-rise Buildings
Ways of Lessening Pre-Movement Time
Pre-movement time refers to the time before, and accompanying events prior to the evacuation of a given area. Examples of events that may require pre-movement time are wars, fire incidences, hurricanes, and nuclear accidents. Pre-movement time involves four events, namely detection, emergency recognition, commencing evacuation, and the number of people or the size of the territory (Tubbs and Brian 17).
In order to reduce the pre-movement time, buildings should be installed with gadgets for alerting the occupants in time of events that may require evacuation. Such gadgets may include alarm systems and electric bells. The occupants and the public should be familiar with the sounds that the alarm devices produce. This will reduce confusion among the occupants in time of emergencies, and they will be in a position to respond to the sound with immediate effect (Tubbs and Brian 28).
Training should be offered to the public on how to respond to emergencies in order to reduce the level of panic among them. It is evident that some people have poor reactions towards emergencies and may even collapse as a result of panic. Emergencies that require evacuation are common and may occur at any given time. The public should, therefore, be prepared to react instantly towards them.