The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Understanding Fire Development – Part 283

December 16, 2024 12:13 pm

Lawrence Webster Forrest (LWF) is a specialist fire engineering and fire risk management consultancy whose aim is to give information on best practice in fire safety for facilities management personnel through this blog series. In part 282, LWF continued to examine how people behave when they do not understand uncontrolled fire development in a building. In part 283, we resume discussing human behaviour in fire situations.

It is common for people who have begun an activity to wish to continue with it, despite fire alarms or other interventions for them to evacuate. In the last blog, we talked about how football supporters continued to watch the game despite a fire in the stands and particular problems are also often seen in retail premises and restaurants, where people have ordered or are eating food.

Fires and Human Behaviour by David Canter (first published in 1980, updated and republished 1990) contains a great deal of valuable information from historically relevant real fires, including quotes from people who were present.

In 1960, a fire at Henderson’s Department Store in Liverpool resulted in 11 deaths. The information learned from this incident led to the publication of the fire precautions in the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963.

One customer related that they noticed smoke when they entered the restaurant, but it didn’t seem to be causing any concern and they had started to eat a sandwich.

A waitress in the restaurant told a customer the premises were on fire and asked her to evacuate was berated by the woman who asked to see the manager. The customer refused to leave.

It would seem that not only does the presence of a fire fail to trigger danger signals in people, but that some people actively exhibit avoidance behaviour or denial of the circumstances, no matter how obvious they might be. It could be that they do not wish to overreact to what appears to be a minor incident. Fires in shops have occurred where customers would walk past the fire to continue shopping. Unless the volume is smoke-filled and visibility is reduced, smoke does not seem to instil a signal of danger in the way it should.

Following the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 (the first terrorist attack), where six people were killed and more than a thousand injured, people still entered the smoke-filled stairways and analysis of the event indicates that this was because people didn’t understand or appreciate how toxic smoke was.

In part 284 of this series, LWF will continue to discuss human behaviour in fire situations. In the meantime, if you have any queries about your own facilities or wish to discuss this blog series, please contact LWF on freephone 0800 410 1130.

Lawrence Webster Forrest is a fire engineering consultancy based in Surrey with over 35 years’ experience, which provides a wide range of consultancy services to professionals involved in the design, development and construction and operation of buildings.

 

While care has been taken to ensure that information contained in LWF’s publications is true and correct at the time of publication, changes in circumstances after the time of publication may impact on the accuracy of this information.