SubscribeEvac+Chair International Ltd explains how businesses can prepare to evacuate all in the case of an emergency.
Ten per cent of the UK workforce would currently have difficulty in evacuating a building if they were unable to use the lifts during an emergency and that does not include the number of non-employees who may be in a building, including contactors, sub-contractors, visitors, customers and travellers. Stairway evacuation is often impossible - not just for people in wheelchairs, but also for people with reduced mobility (PRM) due to a number of causes such as walking difficulties, heart disease, epilepsy and so on.
To add to these difficulties, the potent combination of an ageing population and the likely extension of our statutory retirement age will inevitably have an effect on the overall mobility of our workforce. Health and Safety at Work spoke with Barry Scholes, the Managing Director of Evac+Chair International Ltd, about his philosophy on building evacuation.
Architectural advances are having a real impact on emergency management procedures both in the UK and internationally. Vertical villages (the latest term for high rise buildings) are throwing up new challenges as they reach ever new heights. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur hold 5,000 people in each tower, while the new London Bridge Tower, due for completion in five years' time, will soon be the tallest building in Europe.
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) makes it clear that employers must provide adequate access to all buildings. We can no long deny an individual employment on the grounds that a building is unsafe or inaccessible. Normally, employers meet these provisions by means of a ramp from the exterior into the building. Once inside, elevators generally allow the peripatetic workforce to move around at will, and the employer is deemed to have met both his legislative and moral obligations. But although the law protects the employment rights of those with mobility problems, it has very little to say about how to evacuate those same employees during an emergency situation, such as a fire.
Legislative bite?
Although some have criticised it for its lack of teeth, the DDA was the first piece of legislation to address the rights of those with mobility problems in any comprehensive way. Unfortunately, feels Scholes, it has had relatively little impact on improving the employment conditions for people with disabilities in the UK.
He believes that there are fundamental omissions in the legislation. For example, employees are instructed not to use the lifts during a fire, because they can act as natural chimneys and harbour dangerous concentrations of gases. Yet the DDA makes no requirements for employers to provide a means of escape for those unable to use the stairs during such emergencies. The standard advice is to identify a 'place of safe refuge' on each floor, so that employees with mobility difficulties can remain where they are likely to come to the least harm. They are advised to remain there and await rescue when the fire service can safely enter the building.
Clearly, this practice raises an assortment of moral issues, but also some more practical difficulties. "Historically," points out Scholes, "most European countries have depended on rescue services, such as the fire brigades, for rescue. However, this is not their primary responsibility and they cannot guarantee arrival within a specific time. The fire service has limited resources with which to attend a fire, or may be engaged elsewhere. The responsibility must fall on the employer." Scholes goes on to raise the issue of multi-tenancy occupier buildings, where it is not the landlord but the employer or employers who are responsible for the employees within the building.
Times are changing though. New amendments to the DDA came into force in October 2004 which strengthens the requirements placed upon employers. From October, it has been unlawful for businesses to treat disabled people less favourably than other people for any reason related to their disability. Where a physical feature of a building makes it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people, employers must take reasonable steps to remove or alter the feature or provide a reasonable alternative method of overcoming the problem.
Three separate European directives have also influenced building evacuation: Health and Safety CE Directive 89/391; Manual Handling CE Directive 90/269; and Equal Opportunities in Workplace CE Directive 2000/43. Inevitably, the members of the EU have adopted different approaches to the urgency with which they need to implement these directives. But the UK is considered to be well ahead of the game on these matters.
Duty of care
Employers have a duty of care to provide adequate means of escape from a building in the event of a fire. But what constitutes adequate care if you have a disability problem?
In an emergency situation, employers are required to provide employees with adequate means of escape; to provide adequate supplies of the necessary equipment to cope with any emergency; and to provide adequate training to use that equipment. Crucial, however, is the fact that these provisions must cater 'even for the minority interest'.
Adequate care is quite well defined by legislation. It can be determined by the answers to a series of simple questions. Is it foreseeable that there might be a fire? And is it foreseeable that there will be difficulties evacuating employees with mobility problems if an emergency arises? If the answer to these questions is 'yes', an employer must consider how he can best provide for the care of employees in this situation.
Risk assessment
Under the Health and Safety Directive, employers have a responsibility to carry out a risk assessment. Says Scholes, "It is a well known fact that disabled people can move around a building and have access to various levels within that building. Any risk assessment must take this into consideration as far as emergency is concerned."
Comprehensive risk analysis is essential to determine exactly who is at risk and where those risks will occur. Are there any floors which people with mobility problems will never have to go to? How many floors are there and how many exits per floor? What means of escape are available to both the able bodied and to those with mobility difficulties.
This is where Scholes' attempts to tackle the problems of building evacuation come into play. The Evac+Chair enables a single user to evacuate a colleague with mobility difficulties, using continuous rotating v-belts to provide a controlled descent down stairways without the need for lifting. There are, of course, other alternatives to this, such as fire proof lifts, ramps or escape chutes. But as well as requiring significant alterations to the fabric of the building (and thus incurring significant costs), methods such as escape chutes are often not ideal for evacuating employees with mobility difficulties.
Tailoring the solution
Having made the commitment to tackle the issue, some fundamental decisions need to be made: how many chairs need to be purchased and where do they need to be positioned? Chairs should be strategically positioned so that if one exit is blocked, then another will always be available. There may be budgetary constraints, but chairs can be phased in over a period of time, and, as stated above, the evacuation chair is a much cheaper option than many alternatives.
Selecting an off-the-peg solution is really not viable option when formulating an evacuation strategy. Buildings vary so significantly in terms of size, structure, age and how they are used that each needs to be assessed independently if employers are to ensure that they have fulfilled their statutory and moral obligations. "We don't sell off the peg," says Scholes. "We prefer to target our services wherever possible. Just as each building presents unique problems, so our provision to each employer should reflect those individual needs. Site surveys can reveal the exact specification which each client requires."
Implementing the solution
It is important to consider how any solution will be implemented. More workers in the health service suffer back injuries than any other industry, due to the difficulties in moving and carrying patients. The employer needs to question what constitutes adequate care in terms of providing means of escape. Does carrying a wheelchair down several flights of stairs really constitute adequate care?
The Manual Handling Directive has a direct impact on the issue of evacuation. "Just imagine carrying a person downstairs. It is a fairly heavy load needing four people. The weight of a wheelchair adds about 10% to the passenger's weight. A single person is supposed to carry not more than 25kg. You can imagine even with a stretcher you need four people. Again, the solution is the Evac+Chair which needs just one operator."
Adequate training in how to use the chairs should not be difficult for an employer to provide. Scholes estimates that it takes about forty minutes to get to grips with how to use the evacuation chair. Training takes place in companies anyway as part of the fire marshall and first aider programmes, and it is easy to combine chair training with these roles. Fire marshalls should simply evacuate their floor or area as normal and transfer any wheelchair users from the area of safe refuge to follow the others out of the building.
The philosophy ...
The evacuation chair was invented by David Egen, an industrial designer working in midtown New York. In 1979 his wife, a victim of childhood polio, was forced to evacuate her 38th floor office. Luckily the good fortune of a false alarm and a faithful relay of fellow office workers enabled her to escape although very slowly and with great difficulty. Not chancing a repeat of good fortune in any future forced evacuation, Egen started a three year development of what eventually become the EVAC+CHAIR Emergency Wheelchair.
Its originality and simplicity as a dynamic life-safety tool quickly merited award recognition by the Industrial Designers Society of America and sales to building management throughout the U.S.
