THE CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOURS IN FIRE EVACUATION

Abstract

The safety of the occupants is the topmost priority in every fire occurrence. Unnecessary human behaviours such as panic and delay in responding to cue in fire conditions may possibly result in the jeopardizing of the occupants’ life safety. This is especially crucial if the fire breakout is in an underground structure where evacuation is more challenging. A practical example would be the recent fire caused by electrical cable short-circuited at the Newton Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Station which resulted in the disrupting of train services by 2 hours and affected15, 000 commuters.

Although fire drills have been conducted in industrial buildings, office buildings and institutions to prepare occupants for swift and safe evacuation, little has been done to prepare occupants for evacuation in an underground structure. Hence, the consideration of implicit human behaviours influencing the total evacuation time in an underground structure is significant and important.

A case study of a hypothetical Underpass Pedestrian Mall has been conducted. The influence of implicit human behaviours to the total evacuation time of the occupants in a worst case fire condition has been observed in the Pathfinder and Simulex simulations where the difference in results of the two simulations is compared and addressed. Pathfinder simulation focuses on the emergency egress of occupants without the influence of implicit human behaviours while Simulex simulation considers the impact of implicit human behaviours to the emergency egress of the occupants. Each simulation study has three different scenarios with varying number of occupants to determine the impact of occupants’ density to the total evacuation time.

It is observed in Scenario 1 of the Pathfinder simulation that when no implicit human behaviour was incorporated, 100% of the 1,150 occupants evacuated the hypothetical Underpass Pedestrian Mall in 440 seconds. Scenarios 2 and 3 of the Pathfinder simulation shows that 100% of the 575 occupants evacuated in 267 seconds and 100% of the 383 occupants evacuated in 181 seconds correspondingly. However, when human behaviours were simulated in the Simulex simulation, the percentage of successful evacuation of the occupants decreased significantly. This is observed in Scenario 1 of the Simulex simulation that only 6.35% of the 1,150 occupants evacuated the hypothetical Underpass Pedestrian Mall successfully. Also, in Scenario’s 2 and 3 of the Simulex simulation, merely 31.13% of the 575 occupants and 27.94% of the 383 occupants manage to evacuate successfully. Therefore, these findings and results have justified and signified the influence of implicit human behaviours to the total evacuation time and fire safety of the occupants of a worst case fire condition in an Underpass Pedestrian Mall.