Safety of Building Occupants Project

NIST will develop best practices, guidance, and pre-standards for the design and performance prediction of building and community emergency systems through advances in understanding human behavior, movement of people, and building/community-scale safety components and technologies. The purpose of this project is to maximize the cost-effectiveness of egress systems and save lives in new and existing construction.

Objective: To develop, by 2013, the best practices, guidance, and pre-standards for the design and performance prediction of building and community emergency systems through advances in understanding human behavior, movement of people, and building/community-scale safety components and technologies.

What is the new technical idea? Currently, building and community safety systems, including egress components or emergency communication technologies, are designed around antiquated concepts where the limited amount of usable input or validation data renders output highly uncertain. Aggressive building designs, changing occupant demographics, and consumer demand for more efficient systems have forced egress designs, for example, beyond the traditional stairwell-based approaches, with little technical foundation for performance or consideration of economic trade-offs. This project involves multiple aspects of life safety, including fundamentals of human behavior and people movement, technological innovation, predictive model development and leadership in the stakeholder communities. The immediate focus will be on the movement of people in stairwell evacuations and human behavior during emergencies. In people movement, collection and analysis of evacuation data will provide a quantitative basis for egress models. In human behavior, combining the vast body of knowledge on emergency decision-making from a variety of disasters and building fires along with the study of specific disasters, including public response to the Joplin, MO tornado, will improve and standardize emergency communication strategies and protective response procedures for communities and buildings facing extreme events. The project is directly aligned with the draft Strategic Roadmap for Innovative Fire Protection under the “Improved Egress” approach. 

What is the research plan?  The primary data collection and analysis effort in FY12 is focused on the collection of data on human behavior during emergencies. First, interviews will be conducted with people affected by the May 22, 2011 Joplin, MO tornado (either via direct accounts from survivors and families and friends of victims) to collect information on public response behavior, situation awareness, emergency communications (including warnings provided, interpretation of the warnings, and response to warnings) and pre-tornado perceptions and preparation activities. Additional information including prior U.S.-based tornado incidents and community response; national codes, standards and practices for U.S.-based tornado warnings; third-party eyewitness accounts from the Joplin tornado, and pre-event archival records for Joplin, MO will be collected and analyzed in order to document how situation awareness, decision-making and the environment influenced the performance of protective actions and survival during the tornado event. Second, EL will convert the conceptual model of human behavior (from analysis of the 2001 WTC attacks) into modeling code to simulate the pre-evacuation period of a building fire. The BETA 1.0 version of this model will be released for comment.

In people movement on stairs, the collection of data from additional building observations will continue, depending upon negotiating access to building fire drills. It is expected that additional building observations will be conducted to complete the parametric study of stairwell movement. The key parameters include the density of the stairs, stairwell width, first-responder counterflow, and building height. Also in FY 2012, we will continue analysis of egress data already collected. Presently, data from 12 building evacuations have been collected in buildings ranging from 6 to 62 stories and analysis of these data are ongoing. Relevant findings will be submitted to appropriate journals for publication, as well as codes and standards bodies, including NFPA 101 and the International Building Code.

Major Accomplishments:

Recent Results:

Outputs:

• PED2010 Proceedings^[1]
• Guest edited issue of Fire Technology based upon papers from the PED2010 conference
• Four journal papers were accepted for publication^{[2],[3],[4],[5]}, one journal paper was accepted with revisions^[6], and three journal papers were submitted for peer review^[7],[8],[9].
• Two articles were published in trade magazines^[10],[11].
• A NIST Technical Note was published on the combined elevator/stairwell evacuation strategies and submitted to a journal^[12].
• Video-based observation of 12 fire drill evacuations have been completed with analysis published for six.

Outcomes:

• Conceptual model of human behavior during the pre-evacuation period was completed and is in peer review for publication in an archival journal^[13].
• complete datasets for 5 of these buildings are available online (http://www.nist.gov/el/fire_research/egress.cfm).^[14]
• Public release of the Egress Estimator Model with Technical Reference Document^[15] (measures evacuation timing using stairs and elevators).

Impact: Protected elevators that explicitly credit NIST/ASME activity are being included in several buildings worldwide. Results of NIST elevator research are documented in numerous publications^[16]. Also, the NIST Egress website has received over 1,700 hits since October 1, 2010 (http://www.nist.gov/el/fire_research/egress.cfm).

Standards and Codes:Project staff serves on committees developing technical standards for technology, including elevators (ASME), people with disabilities and stair descent devices (RESNA), and V&V for egress models (ASTM). Staff also serve on committees developing standards for performance-based design procedures (ISO). In addition, project findings provide technical foundation to codes which require the aforementioned standards (NFPA and ICC), and staff are committee members in both organizations^[17].