Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

At a building fire, occupants should usually escape to the ground level or a floor of refuge by stairs, but not by elevators. However, in fact in many of the past fires, not a few people used elevators for their evacuation. Also, it is expected that the number of people who have difficulty to use stairs in evacuation would become larger, since the proportion of aged people in the total population has been rapidly increasing recently in Japan. To consider this situation, we made a simplified elevator service model to evaluate effectiveness of evacuation by elevators, and conducted some case studies in order to examine the feasibility and problems of elevator use for evacuation. As a result of case studies, the diverging point of the advantage of evacuation by elevator to compare with evacuation by stairs appears roughly on 14th floor to 16th floor.