Means of escape is the one safety system that must work while people are frightened, the lights may be out and the air is filling with smoke. It is also the system most easily degraded, because every step that degrades it is reasonable on the day it happens.
How a good design becomes a bad one
- Storage in the route. Stock against a corridor wall, a pallet in a stairwell, a trolley parked at the top of stairs. Each narrows the route or becomes an obstacle in the dark.
- A chained or padlocked final exit. Almost always done for security, and it converts an exit into a trap. Security and escape are both solvable with hardware that releases from inside.
- Signs pointing at doors that are now locked, or at a route that was changed when the building was altered.
- Emergency lighting that nobody has tested. It only has to work on the one day the mains fails, and a dead battery is invisible until then.
- Doors that open the wrong way for the number of people using them, or that need a key, a code or two hands.
The arithmetic nobody redoes
Escape routes are sized for an occupancy. Facilities change use: an office becomes a training room, a store becomes a workshop, a shift grows. The route that was adequate for twelve people is still the route when sixty are in the building, and nobody recalculated because nothing visibly changed.
The walk that finds it
Start at the furthest point from an exit and walk out the way a stranger would, following only the signs. Do it after hours, when the stock arrives and the corridor is used as a staging area. Then do it in the dark, with the lights switched off, and see whether the emergency lighting actually takes you to a door that opens.
Everything found that way is cheap to fix. Everything missed is found during an evacuation.
When Did Someone Last Walk Your Escape Routes After Hours?
We assess fire protection as an installed system - escape routes, compartmentation, detection, emergency lighting and suppression - and report what to fix first.
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