Accounting for Emergency Response in Building Evacuation: Modeling Differential Egress Capacity Solutions

Published

April 1, 2007

Author(s)

Jason D. Averill, Weiguo Song

Abstract

The impact of firefighter response on the progress of the building evacuation is not typically considered. The emergency response can significantly increase total building evacuation time. In order to account for emergency response, this analysis considered whether adding capacity through extra stairwell width was equivalent to providing the same total egress capacity through an extra stairwell. An egress simulation with a counterflow submodel was validated against recent fire-drill experimental results to demonstrate the capability of the model to produce meaningful evacuation results. The model was then applied to a hypothetical 50 story office building with 350 occupants per floor. When comparing equivalent total width, additional stairwells outperform wider stairwells from the perspective of evacuation performance, as well as firefighter ascent times. A third stairwell can completely mitigate the effect of firefighter response or even improve the building evacuation time compared to two stairwells with no firefighter response.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 7425

Report Number

7425

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

Local Download

Citation

Averill, J. and Song, W. (2007), Accounting for Emergency Response in Building Evacuation: Modeling Differential Egress Capacity Solutions, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=861437 (Accessed December 3, 2024)