By Dr Vikram Mehta
The significantly higher number of fire incidents has raised the questions of fire safety in our country. With the economical growth, the infrastructure of the country is changing. Infrastructure of the cities like Mumbai, New Delhi is developing, but the question of people’s safety remains the same especially for fire evacuation in high-rise. As the Mumbai Fire Brigade recently stated, Mumbai alone has witnessed more than 48,434 small and major fire incidents since 2008 to 2018. Citing Global Diseases report published in the BMJ Injury Prevention Journal, a news report claimed that India recorded around 27 thousand of the 1.2 lakh deaths reported globally in 20177 due to fire accidents. As per this report, India accounts for 17% of the Global fire accidents. Considering the need of safely evacuation civic bodies like Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) have made provision of Fire Evacuation Lift in building having height more than 70 Mtrs.
Fireman Evacuation Lift is considered to be a new PPE ‘Public Protection Equipment’ that reaches on time to evacuate on time and thus saves lives and assets. It is the primary responsibility of the officials and developers of the country to take necessary steps required for safety of life and property from fire hazards in residential and commercial buildings. This is an era where high-risk comes with high-price. We are paying high price to live in the high-rise buildings, meantime we miss on the safety of our lives. That’s the reason national building code states that building should have an external evacuation system for the safety of lives and assets.
The Fire Evacuation Lift is designed with well advanced technologies like IoT. If fire happens in the building it would send mass messaging to buildingtenants, fire safety system team/security team, lift operator and near by Fire brigade office. Fire Evacuation Lift helps firemen to reach fire affectedfloor safely in minimum time. It carries rapid evacuation of people of all ages and abilities. Fire evacuation lift is designed as per fire lift standards, the cabin is made of non-combustible material and all side enclose panels are filled with ceramic wool with 2 hr. fire rating. Trap door is provided on the roof for emergency exit, wherein the ordinary fire lifts has no provision of trap door and no vision panel is included. Most importantly in such life threatening situations person standing at any floor can communicate with lift operator because of its two-way communication system. Fire Evacuation Lift has 15-30 minutes battery backup in case of power failure. Other mentioned evacuation devices like Fire Chute doesn’t have any particular standards like Lowering Devices, Ascending descending devices. If we look at the past fire incidents, Fire Chute are not feasible to evacuate all ages of people, physically challenge people or Firemen to reach on the affected area from ground floor.
Firemen Evacuation Lift is necessary in the high-rise buildings to avoid such fire incidents and to make the living happier in the high-rises. In almost 3 minutes Firemen Evacuation Lift could evacuate 10-18 people and ERT could reach on 40th floor almost in 1 minute to douse the Fire and save lives and assets. Looking at the current incidents none of the fire devices can evacuate the building on time and can save the loss of the property. During fire incidents if Firemen will reach on time to evacuate the people and to douse the fire then there will be no such loss of people lives and their assets. To control the fire, we need such combating tool that can save our savior ‘FIREMEN’. Thus, serving in saving Occupants Lives, Assets & Assisting Firemen in Timely Fire Fighting & Evacuation golden period plan is to install Firemen Evacuation Lift in every high-rise building. The notable part is Fire Evacuation Lift can evacuate almost 100 lives in 20 minutes.
About the Author: Dr. Vikram Mehta is the Managing Director, SPARTAN Engineering Industries Pvt. Ltd.
Note: Views expressed in this article solely belong to the author and do not represent that of SquareFeatIndia.
Also Read: Rising Fire Incidents & the Need for a Right Combating Tool
