Evacuation behaviours of occupants with learning difficulties in residential homes

This paper reports the results of unannounced evacuation of two residential care premises providing accommodation for people with learning disabilities.

Awareness of disability has in relation to fire safety focussed generally on mobility. With the advent of performance-based fire safety engineering codes which require the characterization of buildings and their occupants it is necessary to obtain knowledge of the likely behaviours of people with learning difficulties in an emergency. The unannounced evacuations which were conducted at 11.30 pm were video recorded to enable observation and an analysis of the residents' behaviours.

The results and observations obtained raise many issues; including transferable training skills, predictability of evacuation behaviours, and the need in performance code evaluation to consider the characterization of buildings and their occupants as mutually inclusive processes.