scholarly journals Establishing the basis for a school bus emergency evacuation time standard

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 100389
Author(s):  
Gerard A. Davis ◽  
Yousif Abulhassan
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Yang Zhou ◽  
Tanghong Wu ◽  
Gaofan Zhang ◽  
Zichuan Fan

Emergency evacuation is an important issue in public security. To make a considerate plan, various situations are presented including blocking the accident area and letting the emergency access path available. In order to offer dynamic evacuation routes due to different circumstances, a multistory building evacuation model is proposed. Firstly, to analyse the patency of the building, an evacuation formula is applied after binary processing. The function of evacuation time and some other parameters is given by means of regression analysis. Secondly, the cellular automata (CA) algorithm was applied to illustrate the effect of the bottleneck. The response of evacuation time could be approximately optimized through calculating time step of the CA simulation. Finally, the value of maximum evacuation population density could be determined according to the analysis of CA simulation results, which was related to the switch state of the emergency channel. The emergency evacuation model was simulated by using the Louvre museum as an example. The results of the simulation presented some feasible evacuation routes in all kinds of situations. Furthermore, the functional relationship would also be given among evacuation time with the diversity of tourists, pedestrian density, and width of exits. It can give a different perspective that the multistory building evacuation model shows excellent adaptability to different circumstances.


2021 ◽  
Vol 134 ◽  
pp. 105038
Author(s):  
Jaeyoung Kwak ◽  
Michael H. Lees ◽  
Wentong Cai ◽  
Ahmad Reza Pourghaderi ◽  
Marcus E.H. Ong

Author(s):  
Zhiqiang Wang ◽  
Jing Huang ◽  
Huimin Wang ◽  
Jinle Kang ◽  
Weiwei Cao

Timely and secure evacuation of residents during flood disasters or other emergency events is an important issue in urban community flood risk management, especially in vulnerable communities. An agent-based modeling framework was proposed in order to indicate how the community properties (e.g., community density and percentage of vulnerable residents), residents’ psychological attributes (e.g., flood risk tolerance threshold) and mutual aid mechanism affect the flood evacuation process. Results indicated that: (1) The community density negatively affected the flood evacuation efficiency. The greater the density of the community, the longer the evacuation time. (2) There was a negative correlation between the flood risk tolerance threshold of residents and evacuation efficiency. (3) The proportion of vulnerable resident agents had opposite effects on the evacuation efficiency of different types of communities, which was to negatively affect low-density communities and positively affect high-density communities. (4) Mutual aid mechanism can reduce evacuation time in low-density communities, and the effect was more pronounced with a higher proportion of vulnerable resident agents in the community. These findings can help managers to develop better emergency evacuation management for urban communities.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 568-580
Author(s):  
Edgar C. L. Pang ◽  
◽  
Wan-Ki Chow

Emergency evacuation for supertall buildings with heights over 200 m require a very long time for occupants to travel down the buildings. Occupants might jam into protected lobbies and staircases, extending the waiting time. There is not yet any code requirement specifically for emergency evacuation in supertall buildings, which are criticized for using the same codes for buildings with normal heights. Further, the evacuation design for several existing supertall buildings does not even follow prescriptive fire-safety codes. The underlying problems have not yet been addressed by thorough studies. Evacuation in such tall buildings in Hong Kong will be studied in this paper. The assumptions made in the local prescriptive codes for safe egress will be justified. Three buildings with evacuation design complying with the local codes are considered as examples. A commercial building, a hotel, and a residential block in Hong Kong are taken as examples. The key design parameters in the local codes are for 40 people evacuating with a flow rate of 1.1 person/s through the staircase between typical floors. The evacuation time from each floor to the protected lobby is assumed to be within 5 min. The evacuation times in different scenarios with these assumptions are calculated. Such assumptions do not hold under a high occupant load. The total evacuation time would be extended significantly when the travelling flows of occupants are blocked in any of the evacuation routes. Different fire-safety management schemes with staged evacuation, such as assigning higher priorities to evacuate lower or upper floors first, are evaluated. The results observed for safe egress are then discussed.


Author(s):  
Yousif Abulhassan ◽  
Jerry Davis ◽  
Richard Sesek ◽  
Sean Gallagher ◽  
Mark Schall ◽  
...  

School bus emergency exits are regulated by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 217 which does not consider the strength capabilities of children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the strength capabilities of children to determine the optimal force specifications required to operate school bus emergency escape roof hatches. Force exertions were measured using test apparatuses built to replicate the operating mechanisms of the emergency escape roof hatch on a school bus. Force and torque exertions of 33 subjects in the first grade were measured using an emergency escape roof hatch knob. Forty two percent of the measured maximum push force exertions on the emergency escape hatch knob were less than the 89 newton minimum force requirement specified by FMVSS No. 217. Matching the operational requirements of emergency exits to the strength capabilities of children can help improve the overall effectiveness of the emergency evacuation system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (25) ◽  
pp. 2050273
Author(s):  
Xiaoyong Tian ◽  
Hongjun Cui ◽  
Minqing Zhu

There often exist behaviors of moving against the main direction of evacuation in order to rescue or find the important missing people in real situations. However, the traditional social force model (SFM) often lacks consideration of such “counter flow”. Motivated by this, we improve the traditional SFM to study the counter flow and its influence on evacuation out of multi-exit rooms. We call the person to be rescued “superior” and the rescuers “subordinate”. Two different rescue situations are proposed: superior waiting in place (case 1) and superior moving towards the exit (case 2). The results show that the counter flow will always reduce the evacuation efficiency to a certain extent, and the evacuation efficiency of case 1 is lower than that of case 2. At the same time, for these two cases, increasing the number of rescuers increases the evacuation time. We also find that the existence of counter flow can enlarge the effect of “faster-is-slower”, while increasing the number of exports can significantly improve the rescue efficiency. We hope that this result can help to improve the efficiency of emergency evacuation with rescue.


Author(s):  
Amir Hossein Salarian ◽  
Aida Mashhadizadeh ◽  
Morteza Bagheri

Railway stations are usually considered to be one of the main gathering centers of the city; thus, in the event of any incident, there will be significant casualties. The purpose of this study is to simulate strategies for reducing the evacuation time of the railway station in the event of fire using a safe zone approach with simulation software. To reduce the evacuation time, 18 scenarios were introduced and simulated according to (1) number of gates and exit doors, (2) width of the gates, (3) obstacles, (4) priority of the exit doors, and (5) safe zone. The results show that the best evacuation time occurs by increasing the number of exit doors from two to four and considering a safe zone simultaneously; the evacuation time is reduced by 7 min and 19 s. Using safe zones for emergency evacuation has a significant role in reducing evacuation time and improving service levels. Interestingly, the removal of gates and obstacles would increase the evacuation time of passengers. The proposed model could be used for renovating existing railway stations to decrease the consequences of accidents such as fire.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document