Feasibility Study of Use of Elevators in Fire Evacuation in a High-rise Building

In many past fires, not a few people used elevators for their evacuation, although they are told to escape by stairs in emergency. Also, it is expected that the number of people who have difficulty to use stairs in evacuation would become larger, since the proportion of aged people in the total population has been rapidly increasing recently and also accessibility of disabled people has been improved in Japan. To consider this situation, we made a simplified model to evaluate evacuation time by elevators, and conducted some case studies in order to examine the feasibility and issues of elevator use for evacuation. As the result of case studies, if the elevator use group can be designated only for a small part of occupants such as disabled people, it would be effective to use elevator in evacuation for those people. However, for other general people, it would be better to use stairs for their evacuation in most cases as well as to let the evacuation of disabled people by elevator more effective.