Ask Lemmy

At my office each stairwell has a riding chair at the top. It's only three stories though.

...architect here: we design protected areas of refuge where mobilty-impared occupants can shelter in place until emergency services arrive to evacuate them from the facility...

...you'll often see areas of refuge identified near elevator lobbies and equipped with hardened callboxes for emergency communication, or marked on the evacuation plan if they're in a remote location...sometimes areas of refuge are pretty subtle if you don't know to look for them: we design protected firewalls, structure, and building systems integrated into the facility so the biggest tells are usually callboxes, magnetic door hold-opens, or tracks for automatic fire curtains...

...when renovating older facilities, we do the best we can to modernise life safety within the limitations of existing infrastructure, but the general rule of thumb is that as long as you've improved upon what ~~originally~~ previously existed, you've satisfied your obligation even if it's not at parity with new construction...

(it's not uncommon for old facilities to have gone through a dozen or more life-safety modernisations since the advent of modern building codes, just palimpsested one-over-the-other as standards progressed)

In my workplace, there are a few options: When a disabled person is on a certain floor above ground floor, there will be a special chair they can be put in, that allows one person to maneuver them down the fire escape. Multiple people in the company are trained on the use of this contraption and are notified before the evacuation is necessary.

When there are more wheelchair bound people in the building than there are evacuation chairs available, they'll have to be taken to the fire escape behind double fireproof doors, where the area is pressurized with clean air. There the firemen will evacuate them.

A third option is the area where the elevators are. It closes automatically and has a fireproof door where you can wait in front of the elevators for the firemen to evacuate you using the elevators (or otherwise).

Normally there aren't that many wheelchair bound people in the building that need those chairs, because visitors are normally confined to the ground floor. On a floor where a disabled person used to work (now retired), one of those chairs was permanently available.

Edit: the ones we have resemble these https://evac-chair.com/

One thing I haven't seen in the thread yet, is that there ARE elevators which are intended for use during fire-related evacuations. I've been in buildings where signs by the elevators make it known that during evacuations you are SUPPOSED to use them.

I don't know the specifics, but I would assume these have self-monitoring sensors to allow the elevator control system to determine whether it is affected by whatever is going on.

I suspect the way they work also changes, instead of prioritizing getting around different floors, the computer would start shuttling them up and down specifically to get people from each floor down to ground level. No-one already in the elevator gets to pick what floor they're going to.

Modern buildings are constructed in a way that significantly slows the spread of a fire, and I would assume that the machinery and shaft of evacuation elevators, doubly so.

And same as any elevator, they are built using a level of redundancy that means several cables can fail without issue, as well as emergency brakes that arrest the fall of the cabin should the worst occur.

I've seen contraptions to carry people down stairs. These were meant to be carried by two able people.

Or two able people might just have to carry a disabled person down the stairs without a contraption.

I hope I'm remembering this right. Sounds humiliating but also problematic if people aren't trained to do this and/or leave the building without knowing or caring.