No abstract

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.

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Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) communities are situated at the interface between human development and wildland fuel. In addition to their proximity to susceptible regions, routes of evacuation in WUIs are often limited, posing great risks to these communities in the event of a natural disaster. To begin the research herein, a Canadian WUI community in central Canada was selected as a case study to investigate assembly and evacuation patterns during a fire evacuation to illustrate the complexity of the situation and the current research needs required. First stage simulations of evacuations were performed in the traffic simulation software PTV VISSIM, which extracted useful data including evacuation times and related parameters. Results demonstrated that the predictive power of the software is limited by its ability to incorporate effects of human behaviour and the fire behaviour itself. Thus, extending these findings to include the need for evacuee behaviour and fire dynamics for the formation of a more complete strategic evacuation plans for communities at risk of wildfires.