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As China's population ages and the notion of contemporary people evolves, an increasing number of elderly people opt to spend their final years in a nursing home. Recently, there have been more fires in nursing facilities for the elderly. As a result, using computer simulation technology, this paper creates an evacuation micro-simulation model for the elderly and nursing staff, investigates the impact of psychological characteristics and evacuation behavior of the elderly and nursing staff on fire escape during the fire evacuation process, and designs fire evacuation for nursing homes. Based on the nursing home's regular evacuation paradigm, the study examines the behavioral elements. To simulate the three models and the influence of various behavioral and psychological features on fire evacuation, the authors utilized the MATLAB software, which is based on Agent theory and cellular automata. The simulation results show that the three models proposed in this study are capable of accurately describing reality.

In this study, scenarios were developed to evaluate evacuation safety in the event of a fire in a shopping center with a connected passageway and to reduce Required Safe Egress Time (RSET). The RSET for all occupants by scenario is as follows: The first scenario which used the general evacuation route took 20 minutes and 7 seconds. The second scenario which used the third floor’s connected passageway for third and fourth floor, and using first floor entrance for first and second floor to evacuate took 14 minutes and 11 seconds. The evacuation time was 36 minutes and 52 seconds for scenario 3, which only used the fire escape stairs. The fourth scenario took 4 minutes and 19 seconds and used a connected passageway on every floor. Overall, this study shows that RSET for all occupants is reduced when a connected passageway is installed on every floor in shopping centers. Henceforth, more research is needed to determine whether connected passageway is a single firefighting object or a separate structure.

A fire sensitive plant, Banksia quercifolia R.Br., that often occurs as thickets embedded in forest landscapes in south-west Australia was exposed to repeated broad-scale fires at short intervals. Fire severity and patchiness was mapped using satellite imagery and the response of the B. quercifolia population monitored. Over the study period, the mean interval of fire in the landscape in which B. quercifolia occurred was 1.7 yr—almost half the juvenile period of the species—and the landscape fire frequency was six fires per decade. The population increased in response to episodes of fire escape and fire-caused mortality and consequent regeneration. Unlike surrounding vegetation, immature B. quercifolia thickets were not flammable under conditions of mild weather and moist fuels, so they burnt at a lower frequency than more flammable vegetation in the surrounding landscape, enabling the species to persist. When the thickets had developed sufficiently to burn, the plants had reached maturity and regenerated readily from seed. However, the juvenile period increased by 58 % following a period of 16 % below average rainfall, which has implications for fire management in a drying climate.

Day-care centers and kindergartens are increasing along with the damage caused by fire year after year. Infants and toddlers have a low response capability than adults to fire situations such as heavy smoke which causes less or zero visibility thus it is difficult in evacuation route during dangerous fire situations. Because of these circumstances, teachers need to build a safe pathway signage system along with the usual fire safety training needs of infants and children. In this paper, we propose a system for fire escape which marks the escape routes and are automatically implemented through the push function that smartphone recognizes during the real-time fire situation, and establish a system that verifies its authenticity.

The preparation and practice of home-escape plans are important strategies for individuals and families seeking to reduce and/or prevent fire-related injury or death. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of and factors associated with, home-escape plans in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The study used data from two surveys&mdash, a 2016 fire safety attitudes and behaviour survey administered to high-risk individuals (n = 296) and a 2013 NSW health survey covering 13,027 adults aged 16 years and above. It applied multinomial logistic regression analyses to these data to identify factors associated with having a written home-fire escape plan, having an unwritten home-fire escape plan and not having any home-fire escape plan. The prevalence of written home-escape plans was only 4.3% (95% CI: 2.5, 7.5) for the high-risk individuals and 7.9% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 7.3, 8.6) for the entire NSW population. The prevalence of unwritten escape plans was 44.6% (95% CI: 38.8, 50.5) for the high-risk individuals and 26.2% (95% CI: 25.1, 27.2) for the NSW population. The prevalence of no-escape plan at all was 51.1% (95% CI: 45.2, 56.9) for the high-risk individuals and 65.9% (95% CI: 64.8, 67.1) for the NSW population. After adjusting for other covariates, the following factors were found to be significantly associated with unwritten-escape plan and no-escape plan prevalence: speaking only the English language at home, practicing home-fire escape plans infrequently, being married, being female and testing smoke alarms less often. Future fire interventions should target people who speak only English at home and people who test their smoke alarms infrequently. These interventions should be accompanied by research aimed at reversing the trend toward use of more flammable materials in homes.

Fire safety engineering requires a detailed understanding of fire behaviour and of its effects on structures and people. Many factors may condition the fire scenario, as for example, heat transfer between the flame and the boundary structures. Currently advanced numerical codes for the prediction of the fire behaviour are available. However, these solutions often require heavy calculations and long times. In this context analytical solutions can be useful for a fast analysis of simplified schematizations. After that, it is more effective the final utilization of the advanced fire codes. In this contribution, the temperature in a fire escape passage, separated with a thermally resistant wall from a fire room, is analysed. The escape space is included in a building where the neighbouring rooms are at a constant undisturbed temperature. The presence of the neighbouring rooms is considered with an equivalent heat transfer coefficient, in a boundary condition of the third type. An analytical solution is used to predict the temperature distribution during the fire. It allows to obtain useful information on the temperature reached in the escape area in contact with a burning room; it is useful also for a fast choice of the thermal characteristics of a firewall.

The Hong Kong Metro System has been operating for more than 30 years. With the increase in population, some of the stations are crowded in most time of a day. To facilitate the design and the alteration works for a station, the crowding and passenger movement pattern, especially the escape pattern in case of fire, should be studied. This article illustrated an agent-based people movement model, and a case targeting at the people movement pattern and egress process in a metro station has been studied. The simulation results demonstrate that the model is useful for assisting building designers to evaluate different design alternatives and to support fire safety performance studies.

A study on building occupant characteristics in mass rapid transit (MRT) stations in Singapore is reported in this paper. The characteristics studied include age group and gender distributions, commuters’ response to fire emergency alarms and their awareness of locations of exits, their walking speeds on walkways and stairs. The study took advantage of the fare card system used in Singapore to ascertain the age group spectrum of the commuters. Surveys were conducted among the MRT commuters to establish their intended response to three types of fire alarm systems, namely the fire alarm bell, the live announcement and the pre-recorded message. Commuter walking speeds were measured with the aid of video recording and on-site observation. The distributions of age groups in the MRT commuters were found to be statistically significantly different from that of general public, as there were mainly adults and fewer children and elderly in comparison to the general population. The distributions of gender groups in the MRT commuters were also found to be statistically significantly different from that of general public, as the female/male ratio among the commuters was greater than that in the general population. The survey results indicated that commuters intended more likely to respond to live announcement warning system than to the other two systems. The commuters’ awareness of egress routes was poor. It was also noted that there was no statistically significant difference in the responses by the two gender groups to the three fire alarm warning systems but the study indicated the statistically significant gender difference in the awareness of fire escape routes. A significantly large proportion of commuters was found unaware of or unfamiliar with the current fire escape route provisions in the MRT stations from the survey. The unimpeded walking speed was found to be gender and age dependant and it may not be appropriate to apply one walking speed for all commuters. Weak correlations were found for linear fit of walking speeds over a wide range of pedestrian density on walkways and staircases. Keywords: Commuters; Evacuation

The purpose of this visual inquiry using ethnographic photographic research was to examine fire safety in homes of 42 urban older adults. Photographs were taken to document home fire safety (HFS) practices and grouped according to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Home Safety Checklist categories. Participants had a mean age of 74 years, and were mostly African-American (n=21, 57%), and female (n=32, 78%). Major findings from the photographs demonstrated unsafe electrical, cooking, and heating practices. Other HFS hazards related to installation and maintenance of carbon monoxide (CO) and smoke alarms, smoking safety, and identification and practice of home fire escape plans. The findings will provide future direction for community education and fire prevention advocacy for older adults. Keywords: Home Fire Safety, Older Adults, Visual Inquiry.Seniors in the United States (US) account for approximately 13% of the population, an estimated 40.3 million people; of which nearly 1/3 of non-institutionalized older adults live alone (Leahy et al., 2012; US Department of Commerce, 2011). By 2030, it is expected that seniors will make up roughly 19% of the US population (Leahy et al., 2012; US Department of Commerce, 2011). As many as 85% of older adults, age 65 and older, report having at least one chronic illness (Frosch, Rincon, Ochoa, & Mangione, 2010). Despite this growing demographic, coupled with their healthcare related needs, few studies have been conducted examining fire safety and burn prevention practices among older adults living in the US (e.g., Shields et al., 2013). The majority of fire safety and burn prevention studies have focused on the pediatric population, primarily school-aged children. The few studies that have examined older adults (e.g., Broerse, Zweekhorst, van Rensen, & de Haan, 2009; Taira et al., 2011) have either conducted retrospective studies or focused largely on burn survivors. In this study, we conducted a prospective, ethnographic study examining fire safety practices among older adults.For many years sociologists and anthropologists have been using visual techniques such as photography to examine and understand the social and cultural world around us. Photo-inquiry is a technique in which photographs are systematically presented to participants by the researcher to provide an analysis of a specific area of study. The images in this case documented older adults' home fire safety (HFS) behaviors. The US Fire Administration (USFA) has specific criteria to determine if a home is safe for older adults (US Fire Administration [USFA], ND).Sometimes photographic documentation is elicited from the participant; however, in this ethnographic exemplar we were trying to tell the story in a narrative that introduced a problematic area of safety in older adults living in the community. National and local initiatives are exploring better ways to enable older adults to safely "age in place" avoiding potentially irreversible pain and suffering. Most of those injuries are falls in individuals 65 and older causing further limitations and costly procedures later in life (Frosch, Rincon, Ochoa, & Mangione, 2010). Risk and severity of fire and scald injury increase with age (Peck, 2011). Although the risks for injury and death are well documented (Peck, 2011), little has been done to evaluate the presence of counter measures in the homes of older adults. The goal of this study was to describe, via photographic inquiry, the home fire safety knowledge and behaviors of older urban dwellers.Specific AimsThe primary aim of this project was to describe, using photographs, the HFS hazards found in the homes of urban older adults (over 50 years of age) during a HFS check. Another aim was to take the photographs and analyze them using qualitative research techniques to identify common themes and gain a better understanding of the HFS environment in a group of urban seniors. …

The paper research the choosing of the optimal escape routes in fire emergency simulation. Aiming at the lack of fire emergency behavior description and its path pre-processing mechanism without dynamic adapting, this paper presented a novel algorithm based on geometry method in order to make the simulation according with the facts. We abstracted complex scenes as the graph model, and established an adaptive dynamic path query table to create the dynamically generated map, and proposed a model of population density to restrict the escape expectation velocity, which reflects the population movement of social group behavior in emergency situations. Experimental results show that the algorithm can not only access the dynamic optimal escape route, but also realistically describe the crowd social escape behavior under fire emergency situations.

Forty-eight workers who had escaped large underground coal-mine fires were interviewed using an open-ended protocol. This information, and the actual experiences of one eight-person mine-section crew who escaped from a fire, were used to construct an 18-frame (page) table-top simulation exercise, which was then field tested with 134 miners. The exercise is a research tool that measures miners' proficiency in the information-gathering and decision-making skills related to escaping from a mine fire. It also helps miners to learn and practice these cognitive skills. The exercise was found to be valid and reliable. All miners reported that the exercise was authentic and would help them to remember important information. The exercise total score, and all but two item scores, significantly discriminated among miners with different levels of training. The two items that did not discriminate dealt with whether or not to abandon a helpless fellow miner. When the exercise total score data were pooled, only 13.6% of the miners achieved a desirable score of 90% mastery or greater. The simulation is important because it teaches and assesses critical judgment and decision-making skills that are rarely addressed in miner training.

A changing criterion design, used with shaping procedures, demonstrated the effectivenesses of this simple program in teaching fire exiting skills to a child with severe developmental disabilities. Future research should include more subjects and additional generalization measures.

I HADN'T seen them for 18 years, and I wasn't really sure why I needed to see them now. Still, I had driven 17 hours from my home outside Boston to the small community near the Indiana/Ohio border. My stomach had begun to churn around Columbus, more than two hours earlier. "What if we just don't like each other?" I'd wondered as I drove west on I-70 toward Lewisburg, Ohio, where I was about to be reunited with students from my first class. As I turned onto the exit ramp, I was reminded of how many times I had driven up the same ramp during the two years I taught sixth grade at Lewisburg Elementary School. I drove past the Warnkes' house, where the reunion would be held, and through the center of town. Nothing much had changed. There was still only one stoplight--and still not much need for it. The furniture store needed a coat of paint, and the Methodist parsonage where I had often had dinner with the family of one of my students was a little run-down. There was a new bank with a digital clock, and a brick fire station had been built to replace the one that had burned to the ground back in the spring of '69. I smiled as I remembered the kids' joyful retelling of how the firefighters--or firemen in those days--had just barely managed to save the fire trucks and my seizing upon their amusement to teach the concept of irony. Soon I turned my car into the school parking lot and got out to walk around the grounds. The building had finally been condemned the year before, but it still looked the same as it had the first time I saw it back in August of 1968. Looking up at the fire escape and the door that led into room 201, I was transported back in time. I saw the kids everywhere--lounging on the fire escape reading their books and having small-group meetings; sitting under the big oak trees that lined the playground, clipboards on their knees, their faces scrunched in pain as they tried to think of what to write; clustered around me as we prepared for a kickball game and listening--or pretending to listen--as I gave the ceremonial lecture about why we cannot just divide into teams by the classic boy/girl rule; and emerging from the wooded area at the southern edge of the yard covered with mud and burrs and clutching the fossils and plant life that would become central features of one study or another. And I could hear their voices, not words really, but laughing ... so much laughing. I remembered the frantic call I'd received from the superintendent less than a week before school started. I had no idea how he got my name, but I knew he was desperate. There were only two criteria for employment in those days of drastic teacher shortage--candidates had to have 60 college credits and be breathing on their own. Those who met the criteria could get emergency teaching certificates. I'd always wanted to be a teacher, and now, out of the blue and a full year shy of graduation, I got a call inviting me into the profession. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. I can't even describe what it was like for me when, alone in the classroom for the first time, I leaned against the desk and surveyed the room. I didn't see the institutional green walls, the peeling plaster, or the broken window that later that year allowed snow to blow into our little haven. Instead, I saw a room filled with color and excitement, projects and displays, plants and pets, and children laughing, working, creating, learning, achieving. I could hardly contain myself. I walked to the chalkboard. Not really noticing the wide crack that ran down one side or the missing chunk of the surface, I picked up the chalk and, using my very best penmanship, wrote my name across the black slate. That was the first day of the rest of my life. And I remembered the remarkable times that were the late Sixties. My younger brother Thomas was among the leaders of the antiwar movement at Ohio State. My older brother Miles was a state trooper often called out to "handle" student riots. …

A multifaceted behavioral program designed to teach emergency fire escape procedures to children was evaluated in a multiple-baseline design. Five children were trained to respond correctly to nine home emergency fire situations under simulated conditions. The situations and responses focused upon in training were identified by a social validation procedure involving consultation with several safety agencies, including the direct input of firefighters. Training, carried out in simulated bedrooms at school, resulted in significant improvements in both overt behavior and self-report of fire safety skills. The gains were maintained at a post-check assessment 2 weeks after training had been terminated. The results are discussed in relation both to the importance of social validation of targets and outcomes and the implications for further research in assessing and developing emergency response skills.