A pre-evacuation study using data from evacuation drills and false alarm evacuations in a university library

Abstract

Performance-based fire design can be carried out by comparing results from fire simulations and evacuation simulations. Simulating evacuation of buildings requires engineers to have access to several sets of evacuation data, including occupant travel speeds, flow rates, and pre-evacuation time. Especially in building types where people may take longer before beginning travel to the exits, pre-evacuation behaviours and times are among the most important data required for reliable evacuation simulation output.This work provides new pre-evacuation data collected in four evacuations of the same university library. Two of these evacuations were pre-planned (unannounced) drills, while the other two were unplanned evacuations due to false alarms. In this study, the pre-evacuation behaviour and times of 497 students were analysed using the CCTV videos of these four evacuations. The results illustrate that un-planned evacuations had higher pre-evacuation times. Further, the data analysis shows that the type of evacuation (pre-vs unplanned), the performance of certain actions (e.g., collecting items), evacuating in groups, and evacuees' location explain 29% of the variance of the observed pre-evacuation times.