Evacuation Chairs Australia

Whenever we address issues around fire and disability, and what happens when the two things come together, I am reminded of a scene in the BBC2 television series, The Office. In the scene an overzealous fire warden tries to get an employee in a wheelchair down the stairs by lifting her chair with her in it. When he and a co-worker get down a few flights of stairs, they are exhausted and decide to leave her there because, after all, it is only a drill. The extras on the DVD also show a deleted scene from this episode, where two colleagues of the fire warden find his plans to remove people in wheelchairs from the building with a sort of catapult system, with instructions to leave the wheelchairs in the building ‘in case they get hot’. 

It’s a lighthearted look at what is actually a very real issue – is it always safest to evacuate everyone from a building in a fire situation, or can leaving someone in a ‘safe’ place sometimes be the better option?

A debate surrounding the use of evacuation chairs versus the use of refuges has been raging on the Workplace Law forum since 2003, and one of the comments that came from retired senior member of the Fire Brigade, John Clenaghan, was that if he was taken to a refuge on the sixth or 21st floor of a building and told to wait there until the fire brigade arrived, “I would be out of the wheelchair or whatever and crawling down the stairs”. This raises a valid point – namely, that what might seem like an ideal solution in a fire drill might suddenly be less appealing in an actual fire situation.

Society has changed in recent years; disability has gone from being considered from a purely medical point of view – focusing on limitations experienced by an individual because of their disability – to being considered from a social point of view, which addresses how society and the environment can ‘disable’ any individual. The focus is no longer on how they can get out; it is now how we all can get out. Whilst the stereotypical image of a disabled person is one of a person in a wheelchair, the majority of people covered by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) aren’t wheelchair users; out of the ten million adults covered by the provisions of the DDA in the UK, only 500,000 are wheelchair users, whilst 2.5 million are visually impaired and eight million are hearing impaired. This means that considerations other than how to get down the stairs need to be made.