Evacuation behaviours of children and adolescents during fire drills in school settings

Evacuation theories in fire safety engineering often fail to properly address the needs and behaviours of vulnerable populations like children in schools, focusing mainly on adults. This paper intends to provide an overview of recent studies on evacuation behaviours of school children and adolescents (ages 4 to 17) during quasi-announced fire drills involving over 400 participants. The studies captured evacuation movements across stairs, corridors, and exit doorways by mounting go pro cameras. Key parameters, such as movement speed, flow rates, and population density, were analysed using the captured videos. The findings unveiled a meaningful difference in evacuation behaviour between children and adolescent populations. Children often moved in clusters, waiting for friends, while adolescents demonstrated behaviours closer to adults. These social interactions and physical behaviours led to variations in flow rates and speeds, which were also age and gender dependent. Younger children achieved higher flow rates up to 2 persons/s/m, compared to adolescents, who were recorded as 1.5 persons/s/m. Average stair speeds were 0.84 m/s for children and 0.73 m/s for adolescents, with female adolescents generally moving slower than males. These studies underlined the importance of integrating these unique evacuation behaviours into current egress design methodologies and consider the distinct physical limitation of school populations when developing evacuation strategies.