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• 497 exit decisions during actual evacuation drills and false alarms in a university library were examined. • Essential factors influencing pedestrian exit choices were analyzed using a multinomial logit model. • Evacuees preferred exits chosen by the majority, nearby, guided by staff, or already familiar. • Crowding and familiarity had less impact on exit choices in drills compared to false alarms. Effective disaster management and public safety rely heavily on understanding human behaviour during evacuations. This study investigates 497 occupant exit choices in real-world evacuation scenarios including two evacuation drills and two false alarm evacuations in a university library building. These authentic settings offer a unique opportunity to examine real-world decision-making processes during evacuations. Employing a multinomial logit model, we quantitatively assess the impact of essential factors on human decision-making. Statistical analysis reveals that participants tend to choose the exits chosen by the majority, closer exits, exits indicated by staff, or exits they are familiar with. We found that participants on the ground floor showed a greater preference for familiar exits compared to those on other floors. Most importantly, we found that in fire drills the effect of crowding and familiarity on exit choices was reduced compared to false alarm evacuations. These findings underscore the critical implications for the conduct of drills and emphasise the importance of studying the contextual dependency of human behaviour during evacuations. Our work also contributes a novel exit choice dataset collected in a naturalistic setting and highlights the importance of the context in influencing pedestrian decision-making during evacuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A survey and interview study was conducted on effects of evacuation training. • Training has positive effects on perceived familiarity with procedures. • Themes included risk perception, training improvements, benefits and experiences. • Early-age education in fire evacuation is crucial. This article presents an online survey with 323 respondents and 28 semi-structured interviews performed to investigate people's perceptions of fire evacuation training and their attitudes towards it. The survey results showed that respondents with experience in fire evacuation training judge a fire in buildings that feature non-combustible materials to be more severe than other people, but no effects towards the willingness to live on higher building floors are observed in the data. Significant positive training effects are found towards individual perceived familiarity with safety procedures and perceived personal responsibility in fire safety. Inductive thematic analysis of the interviews resulted in the identification of four main themes that participants reflected in connection to evacuation training, namely 1) risk perception, 2) aspects that would improve fire evacuation training, 3) perceived benefits and challenges of fire evacuation training, 4) experience and anticipated behaviours during a fire evacuation scenario. Evidence of positive effects on participants' perceived preparedness through fire evacuation training are found in the quantitative and qualitative data alike. Results from the survey show a positive correlation between perceived preparedness and perceived training quality which should thus be considered further (e.g., lack of perceived urgency and seriousness of the simulated training situations). Interviewees reported early-age education in fire evacuation training to play a crucial role in retaining knowledge. These findings suggest the importance of considering the general public when designing fire evacuation training to ensure effectiveness and acceptance of training in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long‐term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre‐movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, this journal published an article (Peacock et al. in Fire Technol 53:845-871, 2017) describing a study done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Engineering Laboratory. That article provides a description of data collected during fire drill evacuations of 11 office buildings and 3 residential buildings throughout the United States. A total of 32 stairs were observed. These data were analyzed with two goals in mind: to present the self-exciting Hawkes point process as a means to capture occupant interactions in stair exit processes, and to use this point process representation to derive a minimum stair width determination that compensates for human interaction. By way of accomplishing these goals, it is shown by modeling occupant exit times as a point process more information than flow rate is extracted. This additional information resides in the process's intensity function, i.e., the instantaneous exit rate of occupants through a stair exit, which has units of persons per unit time. For example, it is shown that the following behavior is captured by a Hawkes intensity. When a slow moving occupant on a stair is met, occupants behind either decrease their speed and follow that occupant or move to pass the occupant. Our results indicate that a larger minimum stair width would help accommodate movement in stairs caused by these types of interactions. By modeling the exit process as a Hawkes point process and using hydraulic model equations, we derived a point estimate 1.308 m for minimum stair width and a 95% confidence interval [1.193 m, 1.334 m] bounding minimum stair width, whereas the normative minimum stair width value set by the U.S. building code is 1.12 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the Bug Club camp which took place at the Hill End in Oxford, England from August 9 to 12, 2018 is offered. Activities during the camp include fire drill, running moth traps and the efforts of philanthropists couple Raymond and Hope Ffennell in providing opportunities for disadvantaged young people as they shared the health benefits of learning in an outdoor environment. The presence of several species of moth also indicates the presence of damp and water areas.

The need to manage embedded systems, brought forward by the wider adoption of pervasive computing, is particularly vital in the context of secure and safety-critical applications. Technology infiltrates in ordinary things, hitching intelligence and materializing smart systems. Each of these individual entities monitors a specific set of parameters and deduces a constrained local view of the surrounding environment. Many distributed devices exchange information in order to infer the real system state and achieve a consistent global view. However, conflicts may arise due to the integration of deficit pieces of local knowledge. Robust and efficient conflict resolution is essential, especial in cases of emergency where the system must contribute with timely and accurate data to the overall crisis management operation. In this paper, we present AmbISPDM - a formal framework for the management of embedded systems with a coherent conflict resolution mechanism. The process is implemented as a software agent’s reasoning behaviour and applied in the multi-agent domain. As a proof of concept, a smart university campus setting is deployed, with agents controlling embedded devices to assist living conditions in normal operation and the evacuation planning in case of fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fire drill is a method of practicing how a building would be evacuated in the event of a fire or other emergencies. Many jurisdictions require that fire drills be conducted at certain intervals, but high costs and low efficiency of traditional fire drills require urgent innovative solutions. To improve the efficiency of mandatory fire drills and train the personnel to a variety of fire scenes, a new fire drill platform combining a somatosensory camera, Kinect, and virtual reality (VR) is proposed. The platform ensures the somatosensory interaction between human and 3D objects in the virtual simulation environment. The integral constituents of the proposed platform, namely: 3D modeling, scene building with Unity 3D game development platform, human skeletal identification by Kinect sensor, and the Euclidean distance matching recognition algorithm for body movements are discussed. The evaluation of fire drills via the proposed technique was conducted by a survey of 20 trainees. The results obtained strongly suggest that the system has a practical significance and is instrumental in fire drills, fire safety training, and other applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results from a round-robin study in which practicing fire safety engineers simulated the same scenario are presented in this paper. The simulation task included the simulation of an 800 mm heptane pool in a three-room apartment. The participants, representing eight Swedish consultancy firms, simulated the well-specified scenario with FDS 5. The participants received information about the building, the fire mass loss rate and initial conditions. The task was performed a priori, meaning that the participants were not given any experimental or simulation results prior to performing the task. The study shows that there is a variation between the participants in how the input file was specified, the choice of input data and the types of devices used in FDS. The differences in how the fuel and the burner were described were relatively large, which resulted in large differences in mass loss rate and heat release rate. Furthermore, several of the participants made mistakes when the fire was prescribed and this resulted in a variation in the calculated parameters like the temperature increase, which was 300 K in the fire room and 50 K to 150 K in the adjacent rooms. However, the study shows that when the heat release rate and wall boundary conditions were well defined, good temperature predictions could be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data were collected between 2011 and 2014 from five evacuations involving the same school buildings located in Spain. Children from 6 to 16 years of age were observed during the evacuation exercises. Background information was collected on key factors deemed to influence evacuation performance: a description of the geometry, the population involved, the procedures employed and the organization of the drills conducted. Using live observations and video footage of these drills, evacuation data were collected, focusing on the pre-evacuation times, the routes employed, the travel speeds adopted and the arrival times. These data informed a range of a posteriori simulations, conducted by using four computer models (buildingEXODUS, MassMotion, Pathfinder and STEPS) and the Society of Fire Protection Engineering hydraulic model (i.e. Society of Fire Protection Engineering hand calculations). Comparisons were drawn between the models' output and against the observed outcome for one of the trials to determine the accuracy of the model predictions given that they were configured by using the initial conditions for a specific evacuation. The purpose of this work is to (1) provide insight into the configuration of these models for equivalent scenarios, (2) examine any variation in the simulated conditions given equivalent initial conditions, and (3) provide suggestions on how to perform validation studies for multiple evacuation models. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire management plans (FMP) are complex documents that receive little evaluation of whether their objectives are met. We evaluate the Archbold Biological Station (ABS) FMP for goals related to the fire regime (area burned, seasonality, severity, and fire return intervals). The goals include increasing the area burned with prescribed fires, burning more areas during the May-September natural (lightning) fire season, and maintaining variation in fire severity. The ABS FMP is based on the concept of modal fire-return intervals (FRI) for each vegetation type that allow for variation in FRI in space and time. Our analysis uses detailed spatial data (5-m grid) on vegetation, fire extent, and severity. From 1967 to 2014, ABS increased area burned with prescribed fires. Over time, a greater proportion of ABS was burned with lightning-season fires. Burns had variable but mainly high severity. Fire severity varied with vegetation but was consistent over time. Vegetation slated for frequent burns tended to be behind schedule, while rosemary scrub, slated for infrequent fire, was ahead of schedule. The intermediate scrubby flatwoods, which comprise the largest part of the ABS landscape, had a FRI distribution that matched the FMP. The combination of fire mapping, FRI targets, and GIS offers a verifiable and consistent method of tracking fire regime goals in an FMP. We discuss inevitable tradeoffs in managing fire for multiple species and vegetation types over a large landscape and we provide recommendations for FMP monitoring and evaluation that may be broadly applicable to fire-adapted vegetation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of pedestrians' evacuation from buildings, when an exit consists of two same-sized doors, with the same travel distance requirements, would the usage of doors be optimized by pedestrians? In this article, the imbalanced door choice of evacuees was investigated through experiment and modeling. The flow and crowd density in the exit zone during the announced evacuation drill was measured. It was found that the two doors were not used evenly by analyzing the number of passing people, especially when the instantaneous outflow was medium. Furthermore, to understand the specific behavior, the evacuation was reproduced by using a modified social force model, in which evacuees can move to and choose the doors randomly. As a key parameter in the dynamical model that needs to be calibrated, the desired velocity of evacuees, which ranges from 1.4 m/s to 2.0 m/s, were examined. The simulation results are in agreement with the experimental results on the imbalanced door choice pattern and other relevant factors. Moreover, discussion was conducted on the effect of imbalanced door choice on instantaneous velocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data on the movement speeds of occupants with various types of mobility impairments evacuating two residential facilities for older adults located on the East Coast of the USA with the goal of better understanding of behavior and movement speeds during stairwell evacuation with and without assistance. The building populations who took part in the current study comprised a diverse array of older adults and disabled residents descending the stairwells by the following methods: self-evacuation without assistance, assistance using a cane, assistance from another occupant or firefighter, or assistance using a stair chair. Movement data of these specific groups were compared and contrasted with other data collected on mobility-impaired individuals. In the current study, the National Institute of Standards and Technology observed overall average speeds of 0.31 ± 0.16 m/s (with individual speeds ranging from 0.07 to 0.91 m/s), which in some cases, approximate the speeds of disabled people and older adults found in earlier studies, and in other cases are slower than those observed in previous studies. Slower speeds reported here may have resulted from observing a wider variety of mobility impairments (because one of the buildings observed was an assisted-living facility) and from evacuation assistance provided by untrained populations. These data provide an adequate confirmation of exiting literature values typically used for disabled movement speeds in addition to updated values for future analyses. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article discussing topics which include cloud computing, fire modeling, and fire dynamics simulator that was published in the September 25, 2014 issue of the periodical.

Cardiac arrest in pregnancy is a rare but catastrophic obstetric emergency, with a quoted incidence of 1:20,000 pregnancies. Speedy multidisciplinary interventions are crucial for good maternal and foetal outcomes. A perimortem caesarean section (PMCS) initiated within 4 min of onset of cardiac arrest to minimise the effect of aortocaval compression on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has been recommended as a key intervention, which is likely to improve survival of both mother and foetus. Sudden collapse is uncommon in pregnant women and their management is more challenging than in a non-pregnant patient. This article aims to emphasise the significance of early identification and management of impending or established maternal cardiac arrest. We propose that a focus on effective and good-quality CPR, utilising key interventions such as early airway control, left uterine displacement and a timely decision for a PMCS with multidisciplinary input is more likely to result in good maternal and foetal survival and neurological outcomes. We also discuss the role of 'fire drill' obstetric training for key staff and the use of a dedicated hospital-wide resuscitation code for managing collapse in obstetric patients in improving survival and outcomes. We present four cases of maternal cardiac arrest managed with PMCS in our hospital, highlighting the evolution in management and with improved outcomes following changes to our resuscitation guidelines, training and workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readymade garments are the most important export item from Bangladesh, yet the working conditions and fire safety records in the factories are often not up to the standard. Despite a number of initiatives to curb fire accidents in the garment industry, there are still a significant number of fire occurrences in this industry. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive statistics on the current status of fire provisions and management practices in the readymade garment factories in Bangladesh. Given the management practices (soft issues) are often as important as structural fire safety measures, yet difficult to regulate, this paper develops a fire risk index (FRI), the first of its kind in Bangladesh, for soft parameters in the garment industry. FRI for 60 random garment factories are developed through surprise inspections to understand the current status of fire risk due to inadequacies in the soft parameters. Results show that the mean FRI is 2.8 on a scale of 5.0, which indicates an alarming condition. Locked exit doors, lack of emergency announcement system and lack of fire drills are the three worst performers among the 24 investigated parameters and require immediate attention from the regulators and stakeholders. We also observed a U-shaped relationship between FRI and factory size. Factories that are members of the industry's trade lobby generally have better fire safety practices than the non-members. Given the importance of the readymade garment sector in many developing countries, poor fire safety record and lack of information on fire safety, our approach of developing an FRI for the industry can be very useful to understand the immediate concerns and thus to curb fatalities and injuries from fire accidents in this sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyses data on occupants׳ movement on stair landings collected during an evacuation drill performed in a six-storey office building in the United States. A total of 215 occupant travel path trajectories were filmed and time on the stair landings and egress behaviours were analysed. Data were analysed using a probabilistic approach, i.e., the probability of different occupant travel paths were calculated in relation to two different factors: (1) crowding on the landings, and (2) the type of interactions between occupants (e.g., merging flows, deference/overtaking behaviours, etc.). Results showed that a higher number of occupants on stair landings caused an increase in the probability for (1) longer travel paths and (2) usage of the outer boundaries on the stair/landing connections. This paper highlights that data and modelling assumptions should be used after a careful evaluation of their field of applicability. In the case of a low occupant load and non-homogenous merging streams (a higher number of people entering the landing from the stairs than the door), floors tend to be emptied from the top to the bottom. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

BACKGROUND: Since the World Trade Centre attacks on September 11, 2001, there is an increased awareness towards the importance of safety systems in high-rise buildings. From a medical perspective, evacuation and treatment of the victims in this situation is very challenging especially in dealing with multiple injuries. It is important to know the pattern of common injuries that may occur during high-rise evacuation drill for better emergency preparedness. METHODS: This is a descriptive study looking at the incidence of injuries during high rise evacuation drills. Participants that required medical attention during drills were included in the study. RESULTS: There were 11 real patients treated in the medical station during drills. Of the total number of victims, 3 (27.3%) suffered from vasovagal attack, 3 (27.3%) asthmatic attack and 3 (27.3%) ankle sprain. Only 1 (9.05%) had severe hypertension and acute coronary syndrome respectively. CONCLUSION: With this finding, it is important for standby medical team during high rise evacuation drills to anticipate the type of injuries and help them to prepare resuscitation equipment accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the fire fighting situation at the Prince George's county courthouse in Maryland in November 2004 and its consequences. It further discusses the benefits of evacuation drills among employees which led to no loss of life in that accident. The article concludes that the best practice in preparing for a disaster is rehearsal of disaster management drills.

The article focuses on the execution of Pandemic-Continuity of Operations Plan (P-COOP) when a fire broke at the Chatham County Courthouse in Pittsboro, North Carolina on March 25, 2010. It discusses the role of P-COOP in ensuring the needed response from the court offices in emergency without disrupting the efforts of public health and safety officials. It emphasizes on the effectiveness of the P-COOP in aforesaid emergency situation and suggests its adoption in other places as well.

Abstract: To ensure people’s safety in case of fire in buildings it is fundamental to design and manage an effective egress system. Generally, the design and management of the egress system safety is achieved using either the prescriptive codes or performance based tools (mainly evacuation models). In this paper PASS (Preliminary Assessment of the egress System Safety), a method developed to allow a rapid screening of egress system vulnerability, is presented and applied to a case study. PASS is a set of simple analytical equations that allow assessing at different levels of analysis the egress system performance without simulating the evacuation process. It incorporates factors used to include in the assessment the main interrelationships between people–building–environment and to adapt PASS to different scenarios. The method was preliminary applied to a case study (high school). PASS results were compared with two evacuation models (STEPS and FDS+Evac) and data collected from an announced evacuation drill. A good agreement between PASS analysis, the data collected during the evacuation drill and the evacuation models was obtained. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article presents a new transcription of the word τρυϲινον in P.Oxy. XIV 1674.5 based on a recent autopsy, a word which Grenfell and Hunt left untranslated in their edition due to its being unattested in the Greek language. The word is most likely a misspelling of a common Greek word meaning 'fire drill', and would thus fit well within the agricultural context of the letter. An image of P.Oxy. XIV 1674 is published here for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire extinguishers can save lives and are placed in locations that make them easily accessible and in plain view in case of an emergency. However, despite having viewed these bright red objects many times, people may be unaware of their precise locations or even of the fact that they have seen them so often in their workplace environment. We tested the ability of occupants of an office building to recall the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, as well as other objects (e.g., clock, drinking fountain). Despite years of exposure to it, a majority failed to remember the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, although they were able to locate it relatively quickly when asked to search for it. The results support an important distinction between seeing and noticing objects and reveal a novel form of inattentional amnesia for salient objects. The study also created an important learning event via failed retrieval, which could be essential to survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The time that it takes an occupant population to reach safety when descending a stairwell during building evacuations is typically described by measurable engineering variables such as stairwell geometry, speed, density, and pre-evacuation delay. In turn, engineering models of building evacuation use these variables to predict the performance of egress systems for building design, emergency planning, or event reconstruction. As part of a program to better understand occupant movement and behavior during building emergencies, the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been collecting stairwell movement data during fire drill evacuations of office buildings. These data collections are intended to provide a better understanding of this principal building egress feature and develop a technical foundation for future codes and standards requirements. To date, NIST has collected fire drill evacuation data in eight office building occupancies ranging from 6 to 62 stories in height that have included a range of stairwell widths and occupant densities. While average movement speeds in the current study of 0.48m/s±0.16m/s are observed to be quite similar to the range of literature values, local movement speeds as occupants traverse down the stairwell are seen to vary widely within a given stairwell, ranging from 0.056m/s to 1.7m/s. These data should provide confirmation of the adequacy of existing literature values typically used for occupant movement speeds or provide updated values for future analyses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Cylindrical objects made usually of fired clay but sometimes of stone were found at the Yarmukian Pottery Neolithic sites of Sha'ar HaGolan and Munhata (first half of the 8th millennium BP) in the Jordan Valley. Similar objects have been reported from other Near Eastern Pottery Neolithic sites. Most scholars have interpreted them as cultic objects in the shape of phalli, while others have referred to them in more general terms as "clay pestles,"clay rods," and "cylindrical clay objects." Reexamination of these artifacts leads us to present a new interpretation of their function and to suggest a reconstruction of their technology and mode of use. We suggest that these objects were components of fire drills and consider them the earliest evidence of a complex technology of fire ignition, which incorporates the cylindrical objects in the role of matches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Experiments were conducted in a full-scale model room equipped with both movable and fixed fire loads to explore fire growth and spread via heat release rates, indoor air temperature and species concentration. The room space is a brick structure that measures 5.7 m in interior length, 4.7 m in width and 2.4 m in ceiling height. The northeast and southeast corners each feature a 2.1 m × 0.9 m open doorway. Numerical simulations with parameter adaptation were carried out using FDS software to predict the fire features and were compared with the experimental results. In this study, the material properties and oxygen limit settings in the FDS software were tested to explore their influence on the tendency of heat release rate and on the total amount of heat release. The results show that the heat release rate from the FDS simulations is comparable to the full-scale experiment results during the fire growth period. Temperature profile near ceiling can be modeled well. In the full-involvement burning and decaying periods, the qualitative trends were identical, although the simulated value differed greatly from the experimental result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Because of the substantial risk to fire fighter safety in fighting compartment fires, the New South Wales Fire Brigade (NSWFB) in Australia has implemented Compartment Fire Behavior Training (CFBT). The CFBT scheme equips fire fighters with the knowledge and experience required to effectively, efficiently and safely deal with this type of fire, via the use of a demonstration cell (in this case a shipping container) within which the fire fighter can experience, observe and deal with real flashover situations. A crib fire is used as the fuel source with the addition of several particle boards lining the closed end of the demonstration cell. In the current study, the CFBT demonstration cell has been studied both experimentally and computationally while the cell undergoes a variety of different conditions including fuel load and ventilation changes. This data will provide useful additional information in further assisting NSWFB fire fighters in their understanding of fire growth and smoke movement and by allowing them to extrapolate their experiences of handling other possible fires they may face in compartments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of full-scale fire suppression tests was conducted at the San Pedro de Anes test tunnel facility near Gíjon, Asturias, Spain in February 2006. The fuel was wooden pallets or a mixed load of wood and high density polyethylene pallets. Fire protection was provided by water mist systems in different configurations. Because of facility restrictions, some scenarios of great interest, such as a free burn fire, could not be investigated. However, in order to complement the experimental results, a number of computational fluid dynamics simulations were conducted on a 140m section of the tunnel facility. The Fire Dynamics Simulator, version 4, was used for the numerical investigation. An algorithm was developed to allow the fire to spread along the top of a series of pallet loads in such a way that the measured heat release rate was reproduced. Verification and validation studies confirmed that the model predicted the measured ventilation speeds and peak temperatures. The agreement between the simulations and the field measurements was very good prior to activation of the water mist. Back-layering was modeled well. After activation of the mist, the simulations predicted a large drop in gas temperatures, and retreat of the back-layer, but under-predicted the thermal cooling by the water mist downstream of the fire. With the suppression system, high temperatures and heat fluxes were limited to the immediate vicinity of the burning pallets. The model was then used to simulate a free burn fire in the tunnel. The simulation demonstrated the catastrophic conditions created by an unsuppressed fire in a tunnel when compared against the thermally managed conditions under suppressed conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues on the lack of emergency plan in U.S. churches. It provides information on fire drill and the components of the drill, and addresses the element of an active shooter. It presents plans or suggestions that should be discussed with local law enforcement officials in defending emergency shooting. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of various laws with regards to the use of armed security personnel, methods of certification, background checks, and other criteria are also pointed out.

Designing a fire safety measures can be usually achieved in a two ways. One or we should say more conservative way is the use of prescriptive based codes, where all design prerequisites are mainly written in codes. Other or second option is the use of performance based design, where the group of designers, building owners and authorities having jurisdiction are setting up a milestone and design requirements. Simulation of fire and its consequences constitutes a cornerstone of modern fire safety engineering: the simulations enable to examine computationally the adequacy of the design with respect to a wide range of fire safety objectives including safety of life, directly exposed or neighboring property and infrastructure as well as the environment. Each simulation must be based on a realistic fire scenario, which technically formulates social expectation of safety. Designing realistic fire scenarios is even more important when underground car park is chosen as the subject of analysis. Setting the realistic goals and outcomes is a real technical problem that requires realistic and reliable inputs. It is found that fire scenario inputs can be statistical weighted and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Findings in earlier studies on fire evacuation and way finding suggest that building features have influence on evacuation behaviour. For example, way finding is believed to be strongly dependent on the lay-out of the building and seems to be hardly dependent on (escape) route signs. Though some aspects are investigated, it is not discussed at great length. In particular there is little insight in how persons find their escape route, and how this process can be supported with lay-out and design measures has been hardly examined. Thus, there is need for insight in the decision-making processes which evacuees pass through. In this paper are the results presented of 83 evacuation experiments in a hotel building at night. The main focus of the study is on way finding during fire evacuation. In the evacuation experiments we investigated the possible influence of smoke and low placed exit signs on the human fire response performance. The experiments are carried out with a traditional research method, namely the registration and evaluation of unannounced fire drills. The study is conducted as part of the validation of a new research method that makes use of serious gaming. The results of the study suggest that smoke has influence on the route choice: when no smoke is perceptible the majority of the participants escape via the main exit and when smoke blocks the route towards the main exit, the majority of the participants escape via the fire exit. Furthermore, low placed exit signs appear to have a positive influence on the use of the nearest fire exit. The personal feature of prior knowledge of the surroundings (or type of surroundings) is also found to have a positive influence on the use of the nearest fire exit. Self-assessments and interviews after a fire evacuation are found to be a disputable method for research on human behaviour in fire. A real-time observation of the people''s behaviour during evacuation is considered to give more reliable results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on a study which examined posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in Korean children following a single incident of trauma incurred from a fire escape drill. An evaluation of 1,394 elementary students who were exposed to the traumatic event was undertaken using questionnaires such as the Child Posttraumatic Stress Disorder-Reaction Index, Children's Depression Inventory and the State Anxiety Scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children. Outcomes on the prevalence of severe PTSD symptoms are presented.

Abstract: Conducting fire evacuation drills in modern buildings under realistic fire conditions can be difficult. Typical fire drills do not feature dynamic events such as smoke filled corridors, fires in unexpected places or blocked fire exits that require on the spot decisions from evacuees. One alternative is the use of virtual environments. Virtual environments can support the training and observation of fire evacuee behaviours in 3D virtual buildings. However complex virtual environments can be difficult to build. This paper explores how the reuse of computer game technology can aid in the rapid prototyping of virtual environments which can be populated with fire drill evacuation scenarios. Over a three week period, a single developer constructed a realistic model of a real world building to support virtual fire drill evaluations. While participants in a user study found the simulated environment realistic, performance metrics indicated clustering in the results based on participants’ previous gaming experience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It is an important issue that all occupants should be able to evacuate to safety from large public buildings under fire conditions. In this paper, a system simulation model is presented, in which a physical model and a mathematical model are included. Based on the agent technology, a computer program is developed to simulate and analyze the egress progress in large public buildings through combining rule reasoning with numerical calculation, and some crowd pedestrian flow phenomenon, such as aching, rerouting, etc, could be observed from visual illustration of the scenarios. By coupling with the fire scenario simulated by CFD technology, the computer simulation program may represent the overall and dynamic process of occupants'' evacuation under fire expansion, and the mutual relationship between occupants'' safety and fire hazard. An indoor stadium which was used as a competition venue for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is studied as a case. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objectives. I examined evacuation plans from 2134 nursing homes and analyzed national data to determine the types of nursing homes cited for deficiencies in their evacuation plans. Methods. Evacuation plans were assessed according to criteria developed by an expert panel funded by the Office of the Inspector General. Deficiency citations came from the Online Survey, Certification, and Recording database, collected from 1997 to 2005. Four specific citations, for written emergency plans, staff training, written evacuation plans, and fire drills, were examined with multivariate logistic regression. Results. Most plans had water supply provisions (96%). Only 31% specified an evacuation route. The rate of citations was relatively stable throughout the study period: each year approximately 0.6% of facilities were found to be deficient in written emergency plans, 2.1% in staff training, 1.2% in written evacuation plans, and 7.9% in fire drills. Conclusions. Some nursing homes need more specific evacuation plans. Water supply was the most and evacuation routes were the least well-addressed areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As computers become embedded in clinical workflow processes, disruptions to access can have serious consequences. The Health Evaluation through Logical Processing system at LDS Hospital is a computerized hospital information system that has been under continuous development for more than 30 years. The system maintains a 99.85% uptime and averages more than 17000 logons per day. The first formal downtime plan for this system was developed in 1992 in anticipation of a major hardware installation. In early 2000 after a series of planned downtimes from which we did not recover smoothly, our Software Oversight Committee became interested in understanding downtime procedures. A downtime plan for clinical users was developed and tested and is discussed. A March 2000 downtime survey of 103 clinical staff provided additional information to refine the plan. The downtime plan now includes explicit instructions about the clinical data that must be reentered after a downtime and also includes a plan for a regularly scheduled downtime practice drill similar to a fire drill. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The fire in the unsprinklered 36-story Cook County Administration Building on 17 October 2003, resulted in six fatalities and left a dozen people injured. A human behavior study using a questionnaire survey was used to gain an understanding of the existing conditions in the building prior to the fire, past training and occupant awareness of the evacuation procedure, and to document the occupants' behavior and evacuation on the day of the fire. Results show that although 85% of the survey respondents had received fire safety training, only 20% understood the phased-evacuation plan. There were only around 250 occupants still in the building at the time of the fire; half of them used an elevator to exit. Unfortunately, the combination of locked doors that prevented re-entry on to the floors from the stairwells and fire fighting activity taking place from the stairwell, contributed to this tragedy. Various means to improve fire safety management in high-rise office buildings are discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Australian bushfire agencies have a position that people in the path of a fire should either prepare, stay and defend their properties, or leave the area well before the fire front arrives. The position is based largely on observations that evacuating at the last minute is often fatal and that, generally, a key factor in house survival during a wildfire is the presence of people in the building. In practice, full implementation of the position has been difficult for a range of reasons. As part of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) research effort 〈www.bushfirecrc.com〉, our project is examining the evidence base for this position and aims to suggest ways of improving implementation. We have found that the available evidence, which goes back some 60yr, strongly supports the Australian position. The position is supported on the grounds of both improved safety and reduced property loss. The evidence also shows that the most dangerous option—and the cause of most fatalities—is last minute evacuation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]