132 - Dis-abling buildings - fire safety features from wheelchair user perspective with Mary Button

Everybody welcome to the fire science show. Today in the podcast we are covering one of the most important topics in the entire five safety engineering and that is how to provide equitable means of fire escape to people with disabilities. And let me first tell you how I got into the topic and into my perfect guests for today's episode. So I've been to IFSS conference in Japan and in that conference we had this diversity equity inclusion session. So I don't know what would you be your expectations. So it was a diversity equity inclusion session on the fire conference, but damn, it was really, really good session. We had four really interesting talks. One of them was given by Mary Button, my today's guest, and I must say this this talk really hit me hard because Mary showed me some very simple perspective of someone who is a fire engineer and also is a wheelchair user, someone who sees the world through the lens of fire engineering. You know, each of us going to a building. We see sprinklers with being smoke detectors, we see the widths of evacuation pathways, we look at doors differently than other people in the population, and she's also a wheelchair user. So she also has this very different perspective on all of those things. And when I was listening to her in Japan. I was astounded because a lot of what she was saying was very, very simple. Yet this were things that I have not ever considered in my professional career. Fast forward till today in Japan. The audience was not very big, it was a very late session and the restaurants were closing very early for some reason in the beautiful town of Tsukuba, so not that many people have chosen the diversity, equity, inclusion session over leisure time in Japan. There was maybe 50 people in the room, which is a pity because it's such an excellent session, so I thought I must bring this content to more of you. Now. I know this will be listened by hundreds, so I hope to give Mary a great audience and I hope for you. You will get a lot from this discussion, just as I got from being there present in Tsukuba when Mary delivered her presentation. So, yeah, let's go, let's spin the intro and let's jump into the episode. Welcome to the Firesize show. My name is Vojci Węczyński and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants, a multi-award winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Ofr is UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed the reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Internationally, its work ranges from the Antarctic to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to a number of projects across Africa. Ofr is calling all graduates, as it is opening the graduate application scheme for another year, inviting prospective colleagues to join their team from September 2024. By taking this opportunity, you'll be provided with fantastic practical immersion in the fire engineering and unique opportunity to work with the leading technical experts in the field, while learning the skills critical to become a trusted consultant to clients. This opportunity is tailored just for you and if you would like to take it, please visit OFRConsultantscom for further details and instructions on how to apply. Hello everybody, I'm here today with Mary Batten from Maze Fire Consulting. Hello Mary, great to have you in the show. Hi, great to be here. I've witnessed your magnificent talk at the university event at IFSS conference and it was really moving and I felt we need to bring this knowledge and experiences to the broad field of fire engineers. So I've already introduced that talk and people know what we are going to talk about. But for me, the important point of view that you bring into the table is the fact that you have been an abled person and you became a wheelchair user some time ago. You're also a trained fire engineer, so I would love to learn how this new personal perspective of your life has changed your perspective on fire engineering. So perhaps let's start with that how switching into becoming a wheelchair user changes your view over the world.

Yeah, so I grew up with a mother who was disabled and a part-time wheelchair user, and my best friend as a teenager was a wheelchair user, and many of my friends are disabled in some way, and so I thought I had quite a good insight into what it was like to be a disabled person and had some disabilities before I became a wheelchair user. But what really was really salient to me when I started using a wheelchair was how much there was that I didn't know. I think there are things that you just can't understand unless you experience that or unless somebody tells you about it. So, for example, I considered using a wheelchair, the challenges of using a wheelchair, to be primarily about access to spaces, being step free, for example, or having an elevator, but I didn't take into account the cognitive as well as the physical challenges of using a wheelchair. So, for example, when I was at IFSS, I needed to navigate across a busy room, and when you're in a wheelchair, you need to be looking out for where the easiest exit is, one that's step free or has a ramp. You need to be working out where you might be able to move in that space without Hopping into other people, so you're looking for the widest path.

So there's a pretty big planning component.

I wouldn't think about that, yeah you need to be watching for anybody who might be about to walk in front of you carrying a drink because Certainly with my electric wheelchair, once I stop pressing the forward on the joystick, it takes a few seconds before the wheelchair comes to a stop. So any planning to stop in advance. And then I also need to be watching out for people who might be about to step backwards on to me and fall over me. So I didn't take into account that cognitive aspect of actually using a wheelchair in everyday life.

And we're here talking about quite a spacious place because we were in in a large conference center. If you're navigating something like an office, a residential complex, similar challenges. That's you see, from the cognitive point of view very much.

So I was saying to a friend recently that when I was in Japan I brought my steps and with me, and so when we were standing on a very busy train platform waiting for the subway, there were markings on the platform to show which were the accessible carriages, where I might be able to get on without a ramp and where there was space for my wheelchair. But you can't see those Signs when people are stood on the platform. So my need to run off, find where the signs were, come back, tell me where they were and then I could navigate to that place.

If I was trying to do that through a crowd on my own, that would be very time consuming and if we could like I hope you have not been in the fire incident, but let's talk about the cognitive perception of evacuation as capers. So so what you've just described is someone has deliberately placed a sign to make your life easier, showing you where the accessible pathway is. In terms of evacuation signs, I've never I don't think I've ever came across like a sign that will tell you this is accessible Pathway, just shows you the direction. And also, how do you perceive escape route marking in buildings from your perspective?

It's definitely something that's very challenging. I know there's already been talk about where fire exit signage is placed, and often that's at a reasonably high level, but it's actually quite difficult to see them when you're in a seated position and there are people standing around you, so it can be very difficult to find the signage in the first place and work out where the exits are. And you're right, I've never seen markings for an accessible route, and I think that wayfinding in general is something that could be improved significantly, not just for wheelchair users, but for people with cognitive or sensory impairments.

So, again coming back to the planning, okay, you are competent fire engineer, so you perhaps look at the world a little different, and we all have this as Engineers. I always look for sprinkles and fire exits for my curiosity. But you perhaps also have access to other disabled people. You're quite involved. Did you ever talk with them how they plan, they escape route before, and or it's Something that is not common?

I do know one person who's a wheelchair user, who lives in a block of flux, that has some Concerns about the cladding and she has purchased an evacuation chair herself and practically all times using that, with both her carer but also with her neighbors using the staircase at the same time to ensure that she has the wits. But one thing that's been very salient to me is how privileged I am as a fire engineer, as somebody who has their level of education that means I can read journal articles. Who has access to support, who has access to physical aids like the wheelchair, and many people don't have that. So being in a position where you have been able to practice your evacuation is actually quite privileged. Most people that I've spoken to and I know this is reflected in the literature haven't been able to Practice evacuations. They're not included in drills because of concerns about health and safety, and I think that's that's another area where we really need to look at changing.

Do you think it's? Let's talk about those constraints. I mean, on one hand, having a person go through such a Training or this type of evacuation Okay, it definitely puts a more strain and stress on that person. But would it really be an ethical? I mean it's? It's saved that person's life if something's happened, so perhaps it could be better to actually go through the hassle, given that it's annoying. I wonder if a person would feel offended, or rather would accept the fact that we're all training to get better. Sorry for if the questions are ignorant, but I'm simply curious.

It's a complex topic and I think you need to risk assess any drill where you're gonna include Vulnerable populations, but I do think that vulnerable people being left out of drills is a massive issue. You simply don't know what people are gonna need without asking them. There's a there's a phrase that's often used in disability activism which is nothing about us without us, hmm, and that refers to the idea that you know we shouldn't be planning for people's needs without asking them what they are. So I think there are ways of getting round potential risks, which might include, for example, staff members of an office building being the people that use the evacuation chairs for a practice, by Having people imagine the scenario, just talking through a vignette of what might happen and asking them about what they might experience in those situations you can get. For example, if you don't want to ask a disabled person With mobility issues to travel a long distance, you could record the timing that it takes for them to walk a portion of the room and then extrapolate from that. And one of the things that's been pointed out to me by others is that we consider individual movement, often looking at things like our sets, and then we consider people with mobility impairments completely separately to that. Obviously, we think like modeling you. You might have a wheelchair user in your model, but when we're doing calculations we often consider mobility impaired people as a separate category and don't consider the coupled nature of evacuation the back room, for example. In my talk at the conference in Japan I said if the alarm goes off here, my son is not going to leave me here while I wait for somebody to come and assist me. He's going to stay with me. Similarly, if I was in a hotel, my family group would be moving together. If we exclude people with mobility impairments and other disabilities from evacuation drills, then we don't understand their impact on how other people move which I think was going to stay in the World Trade Center research and we don't consider how other people affect their evacuation.

Have you had a chance to participate in an evacuation drill? Perhaps you'd have been stuck in pedestrian traffic. That would be very similar. How does it look from your perspective and how do you observe the flow of people change when there is a wheelchair user somewhere between heavy food traffic? Or you simply avoid those situations?

I think I do tend to wait for the crowd to clear. So if I'm at a concert, for example, I'll often wait for the majority of people to leave so that I know that I have the space to get out without worrying about their movement. But no, I haven't had the chance to participate in drills. I did some research where I asked people about their experience. I think most of the people that I asked were in some way involved in bio-safety or had concerns about it. More likely to have been involved in a drill, but, generally speaking, those who had had just been left in a refuge for the majority of the drill and found that experience very physically and emotionally uncomfortable.

Going back to nothing about us without us. I have a feeling a lot of our engineering is done, unfortunately, against that principle. Here in Poland we are going through a major shift in the law that explicitly tells us to design the building having disabled people in mind, also for the safety reasons, for the safe evacuation, et cetera. And now us fire engineers are burdened, not burdened. We are supposed to design the building having requirements, needs of disabled population reflected in the design. And we have a catalog of solutions to use no step entry pathways, perhaps additional markings, wider pathways, stuff like that. I wonder to what extent we're ignorant of applying those technical solutions. So perhaps from your personal perspective, which of those solutions are real solutions and which solutions are perhaps less preferable by a wheelchair user, for example?

Yeah, I think to some extent I can only speak as a wheelchair user rather than somebody with sensory or cognitive impairments, but for me I think ramps are often seen as a bit of a panacea, but sometimes they're actually incredibly steep and quite difficult for people to use by themselves.

Can you quantify what would be a steep ramp for you? So I assume like a 10% would be a lot, like 3% would be.

I think the guidance is in the UK is up to 1 in 12. But actually that's really quite steep 1 in 12.

OK, how do we be steep yeah?

Yeah, so it depends to some extent whether you're using an electric or a manual and how strong you are, but I think you'd be surprised at how difficult it is to see even quite shallow ramps.

I can like. As a semi-bicycle user, I know it's much harder to go uphill and it doesn't have to be a very big hill to get really tired from doing that. So I can imagine that if you have to use your hands to get yourself through a steep ramp, that could be a challenge, especially that if you leave the wheel, it most like the wheel Gravity will take you backwards, so there's definitely a challenge to that.

And actually going down them is quite difficult at times.

Going down them OK.

I went to Stadia Nang Hotel with a really quite steep ramp and I ended up with friction marks on my fingers from trying to hold my manual wheelchair steady. So it was going down the ramp slowly and in the end I actually ended up getting out of my wheelchair, pushing the wheelchair down the ramp and then getting back into it, because it was such a terrifying difficult experience going down the ramp.

How about the widths of passages, the widths of doors, the way how doors are constructed? Any reflections on those?

Yeah, definitely, doors are a huge issue for me. With the electric wheelchair it's significantly easier because I have one hand free, but the experience of going through a door in a wheelchair means you need to come right up to the door in order to be able to reach the handle and then, if it's opening towards you, you need to reverse, which is very difficult if there are people queuing behind you to use the same door who then take the space. You need to reverse, and then you need to be able to hold the door open whilst you reverse and then go forwards through it whilst holding the door open and then getting to where it closes.

With a self-closing mechanism on the door that is pushing against you all the time.

Very much so. So I think, why do? Doors are certainly very helpful, and when we look at door widths, we don't consider the width of a wheelchair user or any other mobility aid when we're considering how many people can flow through a door. So I think that's something we need to think about. Definitely, either opening devices or hold open devices are incredibly helpful, and one of the other things that can be incredibly difficult and this comes onto the issue of evacuation lifts is the way you're using a lobby. There's sometimes not enough room to maneuver within that lobby to get through both sets of doors, particularly if the door is moving towards you. So I think when we're considering lobby layout and the direction of door opening, that's something that we need to be thinking about just ensuring there's room to maneuver.

So, including the lobby design, that the door will open and it will take some space and the person has to have space to maneuver in the lobby and also have enough space to actually close the door behind them to be in a safe space. Okay, and any experiences with pressurization systems? That could actually be interesting, because that's another force on the doors. If self-closing mechanism is already annoying, that, I can tell you, if the door is in a pressurized state case, it's just gonna be much, much worse.

Yeah, it's definitely an issue. Often people have multiple disabilities, so maybe a wheelchair user, and also have weakness in their arms. I haven't got personal experience with pressurization systems, but I've certainly found things like hotel doors with self-closes on them. They're already very heavy fire doors. Often the self-closer isn't calibrated well and those can be incredibly difficult to open.

And going back to evacuation lifts. So I guess this would be a solution that you could support, right, because they sound like the most convenient.

Very much so. When I interviewed people surveyed people, rather who have mobility issues in terms of evacuation and drills, one of the things that they rated as most important to them was independence and being able to evacuate In the UK. Certainly, a lot of the guidance around implementing evacuation lists suggests that they should be used by a trained person, and I think that we potentially need to reconsider that to allow people.

A trained person as a firefighter with a key.

that is the only person A trained member of staff with a key who's able to drive the evacuation lift. And I've got several issues with that, including it being worrying for the person waiting for assistance not knowing how long it might take for somebody to come, the fact that it creates an unequal situation where everybody else is able to escape before you in many situations, and asking somebody to remain behind to drive an evacuation lift places that person at a greater risk. Often in residential scenarios there isn't a trained person on site, but even where there is, you're asking that person to stay behind and place themselves at greater risk, and so those are some of the issues that we've not been able to self-drive the lift. I think that there are ways that we can improve that, for example, by including people in evacuation drills and evacuation planning. You can teach people how to cooperate with a lift. I mean, I'm perfectly capable of operating a lift in a normal situation, so I don't understand why I wouldn't be in a fire situation if the lift was programmed appropriately.

I struggle with it a bit because obviously everyone can press a button in an elevator and go to the floor of their choosing. That's not a thing that would be difficult and people have been doing it for more than 100 years. I think it could go more into traffic management of the building so the elevator actually goes where it's supposed to go. So perhaps that's an override or on the word that the lift should go. Maybe that's the reason why we have but I can imagine, as you say independence is important having to rely on the third person to actually operate the lift for you. I can imagine that this being to some extent annoying or simply unpleasant for the person. One thing that hit me very hard when you gave your speech in Sikuba you've mentioned that when a person evacuates, it is very important for them to actually take the wheelchair with them, for example, and that perhaps is one of the issues with the evacuation chairs. I mean, they get you out of the building, but if you're left outside the building without the tool that you need to actually be independent, again that's a horrible situation and I struggle with that. On one hand, I feel as a fire engineer, I have succeeded because my job was to get you outside of the place of fire hazard into a place of safety. So you certainly moved from point A to point B and you're outside of the zone of hazard. However, you are in a situation where you're unable to continue with your life onward, so in a way that the situation keeps affecting you. Other people will be also in a situation where they won't be able to just pick up their lives and go on because obviously they don't have access to their homes, etc. But you are in a much worse position. So I wanted to understand again in fire planning and fire strategies we should account for that. Is there anything we can do? Perhaps social services should be equipped with wheelchairs that could be provided to people who are just evacuated. I know in Poland, for example, if we evacuate in the winter, the city will give a bus and they will give you no hot drinks and stuff to people so they don't sit outside in the cold. They will provide a shelter space, temporary shelter, for them. Perhaps we also need to think in our civil planning for temporary measures for disabled people who have just been evacuated and how we help them regain independence again.

Yeah, it's a very, very difficult topic. One of the advantages, obviously, to an evacuation lift is that generally people can take their equipment with them. One of the issues with providing replacement equipment is that wheelchairs are so specific to the person in many situations. So when I was looking for a wheelchair, I needed to consider that I would be able to get it into my car and that I would be able to get it into my home. So I had to choose something that was lightweight and would fall small enough to fit into the boot of my car. I know somebody who unfortunately had a brainstem stroke and has locked-in syndrome. They were unable to speak. They used their eyes to select letters which are then represented on a screen. That's how they communicate. The wheelchair also needed to work in a way that they could self-drive it. So the wheelchair cost in the region of £150,000. In order for that to be provided, we had to fundraise for it. As friends and family we fundraise to get that money. So if that wheelchair was left behind, this person would be completely disabled and it would take a significant amount of time for them to be able to replace that wheelchair and in the meantime they can't communicate. So that's one issue, and for many people, they have medical equipment which needs to go with them, for example, oxygen. So I think we need to be thinking about how we get at least key equipment out of the building with the person, and that just as a bit of a side note. I think one thing that we don't consider when we're looking at our set is the time it takes for somebody who relies on medical equipment or mobility equipment to collect that equipment and set it up or potentially move into that equipment before they start moving. So, as well as the consideration of travel time, we need to be thinking about pre-movement time and accounting for that.

And how about accounting for assistance in our set calculations, like should we include that? I guess this is building specific, occupancy specific. It will be different in the nursing homes, it will be different in a hospital, but it could be also a residential setting in which there's a person living who visited twice a day by social services to assist them with their ongoing daily activities, and then a fire happens and this person is perhaps able to move some place, perhaps they're able to reach the lobby or something on their own, but long-term they require assistance in reaching the final place of safety, place of shelter. You've also mentioned something in your letter that there are people who are able to walk short distances on aided but may require assistance if they need to move further. So I wonder how, as engineers, we can account for that and be more just open to those issues. I don't expect an answer that you multiply time by 1.4 and add this coefficient and you're good, but I just want people to feel this like that. This is an issue, yeah.

Yeah, I absolutely think sort of carrier response or staff response is something that we need to be considering when we're looking at pre-movement time, but also when we're looking at things like travel distances. So I was recently considering the example of an airport, which often involves travelling in an incredibly long distance to get to your base.

Oh yes.

And so we look at things like travel distances within a building or within a compartment and perhaps we need to be considering whether they're appropriate for everybody who's using that building, whether we need to shorten them in specific situations. But there's also the issue of, once you're outside of the building, how far you need to go to reach an assembly point, and it may be that people are able to walk a short distance within the travel distances we've specified, but then we're not accounting for the distance that they need to travel past that or that they need assistance for that. So I think there are elements that we can include in building design, but we need to be thinking a lot more as engineers about the management of a building day to day, ensuring that there is sufficient staff in public buildings to assist people, and providing training and especially around awareness to those people operating a building, because, for example, many, many disabilities are not visible. When you're using a wheelchair, you are to some extent well. It doesn't work, although the number of people who fall over me make me think sometimes that I am invisible, but there are many people who are able to walk a short distance. I'm able to walk a short distance, but wouldn't be able to travel a long distance, and that's an issue for us when it comes to building, design and working out assembly points. But it occurred to me that it's an even greater issue when we're looking at things like wildfire, that potentially, people may need to walk significant distances or travel significant distances, and we're perhaps not accounting for that in our planning. So, for example, one of the things that I find most difficult is queuing, because I'm often stood stationary in a large crowd. The temperature might be high. That exacerbates my symptoms, and so, for example, we're providing buses for people to evacuate from a town. We perhaps need to consider very simple measures like providing seating so that those people can can sit down while they're waiting.

Now, as you touched the design, I wonder how do I include this well, in my design? So if I am designing a nursing home or a hospital, somewhere where I will obviously be dealing with disabled population, and I can quite well define what type of the disabled population I will have, I would say my job is, let's say, easier and I'll probably find a specialist on that. But if I'm designing something very generic like a hotel, like an office, you know, I have no idea what type of disabled population would be there. So perhaps you know some statistics like what kind of disabilities are prevailing in the population and how engineers can address that in their design. You know, because I don't know, like, if I have a thousand people for my office, or sometimes even much more, how many of those would be, on average, wheelchair users? How many would have any other movement impairments? How many would have visual or cognitive impairments? I have no idea on those. It's a huge challenge.

You can look at government statistics. At times, I can provide you a blog that talks about estimating the number of people with disabilities.

Oh, very, very. I would love that. I will link to your knowledgeable and you have access to resources. I don't know If you can send me the links. I will pull all of them into the show notes of this episode and people will benefit and love that.

I can definitely share that with you. But there's a social issue in trying to estimate the number of disabled people in a population. So, for example, there are cultural differences in how people see disability, so there are many people who wouldn't identify themselves as disabled if us, and that can make it very difficult to work out how many people there might be, and it's difficult to work out how many there might be on a given day. So when I've talked to the operators of a large museum, I've said you know what's the maximum number of people you might have, because you could plan for a distribution. But, for example, you might have a day trip from a nursing home on one day and so where, on a typical day, you might have two wheelchair users or five people with mobility impairments, if you have that particular day, you suddenly have 20 people all in wheelchairs, and so you sometimes need to be planning for that sort of worst case scenario. I'm ensuring that the provision of things like evacuation lifts, evacuation cares and stuff is sufficient.

Mary, I know it's a hard question, but you're a fire engineer. You know how the business works Like if we don't have a number, we will make it up, and if we make it up, it's going to be a wrong number. That's I understand it. It's difficult and I'm struggling with that.

I think we need more research in so many areas, including when it comes to drills, when it comes to our set.

But I love your idea about the worst case scenario Because, again, like my building, placing a distribution on that, if I followed that method and I've run enough simulations, I would probably get an outcome that it doesn't work in 1% scenarios and that's a margin. So overall it works and my problem is gone. Well, while I am not really providing a solution for this 1% of scenarios in which my building failed, that's how engineering would be done many ways and here approach of worst case scenario at least, at least, at least allows you to design means of escape. I really like the concept of means. Like you have ability to escape and I provide you with technical ability to do that. So worst case scenario is not a bad concept. Actually, to at least verify your generic scenario, what would happen? What if there has been? Perhaps, what if analysis could be an answer to that as well?

Yeah, I've kind of gone off of truck it in my brain, because there's something that links a lot of this stuff together. There are various views of disability, various models of disability, and ones that I subscribed to and aligned with the most, I suppose, is the Psychobiosocial model, and that comes with. The people do have functional limitations and it's not always possible to overcome them completely, but often a person is not inherently disabled. I am not inherently disabled. I can do everything as long as I have the means to, which is where you're kind of zoning in on. The word means brought me back to this. If, for example, you take me as a wheelchair user, if I'm entering a building which has level access to get in, level access within each floor and an evacuation lift, I'm not disabled, I'm no longer disabled person, I am equaled to do everything. If you introduce a step that disables me, suddenly I'm not able to enter the building and use it, and so in that situation I'm not inherently the disabled thing, I am being disabled by the building. And that's where I think we can work when we're designing buildings to reduce the number of disabling features and increase the number of enabling features. And that links back to what you said about people being left outside a building. If I'm evacuated and I have my wheelchair, I'm able to go about my life, whereas if my wheelchair is left behind, I become disabled by the lack of wheelchair.

This is a really brilliant perspective, because it's a perspective on which you can actually act on as an engineer, because if I understand the disabling factors of my building, I can do a meaningful design that excludes those disabling factors. And at this point I don't consider whether it will be a wheelchair user, an electric wheelchair user or someone who is completely. I don't need to understand who the person is. I need to understand how I am stopping that person from evacuating. I believe the next step would be designing a catalogue of disabling and enabling features of the building related to safe evacuation, and safe escape Is something like that exists.

There is a piece of work that was done by Erics Medberg, who presented in Scuba as well. He has published a paper related to a tool called the egress enabler and along with that publication, which I believe is free to access, there is a spreadsheet and that allows you to go through a building and catalogue each of the disabling features of the building and it considers sensory and cognitive and mobility impairments so you can consider, you can sort of come out with a number for how disabling your building is and work to reduce some of those disabling features of the building. So I think in a lot of the questions that you've asked me, a lot of the solutions that I come up with come down to induce a management of the building. I think it's a lot easier to consider that aspect than it is to consider the design stage. So my ideal world would be, when I'm working on a project, I'm able to speak to the person who will be managing that building at the end of the day and will have input from the people who will be using that building. But I know that often I'm working on, say, an office building which and my client is the developer and I never get to speak to the end tenant. I don't know who they're going to be, and so that presents challenges. So, from a practical point of view, if you cannot speak to the end building users and find out what they need, you need to be considering how you reduce the number of disabling features in the design of the building and to some extent, that gets around a lot of the issues you're talking about. When it comes to the number of people that you might expect in a building, we might still need to consider things like exit widths and travel distances, but if your building doesn't have disabling features, then you need to be worrying less about provision of things like lobbies and evacuation lifts and evacuation chairs.

They're going forward with what you've just said. I think also when we design a completely new building, it's much easier to account for that. When you have a 200 year old building in London and you have to adopt that, that must be a hell to get through 100%.

I have a lot more empathy when it comes to people working with existing buildings, but one of the best experiences I have had as a wheelchair user was approaching the Institute of Civil Engineers in London, which is in a very nice area with heritage buildings that have beautiful marble steps up to them. And I approached this building to go into a wildfire talk and saw these steps in front of me and immediately I see a barrier and I think, oh, I'm going to have to maybe go around the building and try and work out. If there's another entrance, what am I going to do here? And so I was sat there worrying about this, and then the doorman came out and he pressed a button, the stairs retracted Off of the staircase retracted and a platform lift emerged from underneath the stairs Okay, and that platform went up to the entrance level. And then he pressed the button again and the platform lift disappeared and the stairs came back. So, in terms of planning permission, et cetera, and needing to maintain the facade of the building, it looked like all of the other buildings. The stairs were still there, but I was able to access and leave that building and I expressed my amazement to the doorman and he said oh, it's the Institute of Civil Engineers. We've had this for 20 years, okay, nice. And that reduced my level of compassion, I think, for existing buildings, because it turns out there are solutions. We just perhaps need more civil engineers. We need to be thinking more creatively about solving problems.

I mean, that's the reason why you are here in the show. We are reaching a lot of years of practicing fire engineers and my intention with this was to get people to stop thinking about this perspective. You know, I immediately thought about inviting you when you were speaking in Sikuba and you said this example that evacuation exit, the visibility of it is different from the perspective of wheelchair user because of the different view angle. And I am a researcher who's researching visibility in smoke. I've never thought about this, I've never thought. I was sitting. I looked on the evacuation sign and was, oh yeah, actually it looks different. And I immediately see my friend Lucas Arnold is doing this amazing visibility through smoke layers, measurements with optical means, and I immediately see his model of layers, how they would affect the visibility of a sign from a different perspective. And your one sentence has opened a whole pathway of research for myself, because I've simply never, never considered this. And I also understand that we won't give people all the solutions they need to make a world the perfect place for equitable place for everyone. But if someone for the first time, realizes that some of the things can work different from different perspective, they're on the path to do some better, and I really hope we have achieved it in this podcast episode. So I'll give you space for closing statement if you want. So perhaps if you would love to leave the one final message to fire engineers out there, what would it be?

To some extent we need to stop considering disabled people as other. I think disabled people are considered completely separate to other people and actually my experience, both as somebody with mobility issues but also with an autism diagnosis, is that the world is very unfriendly to me at times and I think about the things that would make it more autism friendly. In the UK we have autism friendly film screenings, where the lights are less dimmed so it's not as dark, and the volumes turned down, and I think actually that's not just autism friendly, that's people friendly. There are many people who would prefer us, in a myth, to be less dark and less loud. When I've been researching ways to make alarms better for people with sensitivity issues, with hypersensitivity to stimuli, there are examples such as having a musical output rather than an alarm sound, reducing the volume, having voice messages rather than an alarm sound, and I think that's actually not just autism friendly, that's people friendly. Wouldn't you prefer to have a musical sound rather than a blow? Wouldn't you prefer to have a voice alarm which tells you what to do? And so I think an awful lot of what we can do here is to stop honing in on specific aspects of mobility or cognitive or sensory issues and to just think about how to make our buildings more people friendly. When it comes to evacuation lists, for example, yes, they're incredible tools for people who have mobility issues, but also for family groups, for the elderly, for people with young children. Stairs inherently pose a risk to everybody, not just with mobility issues, so perhaps evacuation lists are more friendly alternative for the majority of the building population.

Fantastic. Thank you for that, and I will make FireSense show home to resources that will help engineers. You already gave me issues. I don't know where they're expecting work. That's a good direction I will hit, and I'm also inviting other people who are working in the space of making fire safety more equitable to all. So I hope there will be more content on this will come from the FireSense show and through this I hope we will make more people aware and together we'll make a better build environment. So, thank you, thank you for that, marie.

Thank you for having me.

And that's it. I must say I had chills doing this talk, like when Marie brought up that if the building allows her to move in the wheelchair, she's able to, and it's the building that eventually makes her disabled. This hits so hard because this is something we can actually act on. I didn't know what to expect from this. I more or less knew what to expect because I witnessed the talk at IFSS, but I really didn't know where the interview will go. But wow, we got a lot from Marie and I appreciate this so much that you have been vulnerable, you have been open, you have shared your very interesting point of view. Thank you so much for helping me actually show your perspective and your view on how we can improve the things, and I will bring more people like Marie into the show. I will try to create a nice resource base for including equity in considerations regarding fire safety. I still have to process a lot of stuff that has been said in here, and I'm sure you do as well, my dear listener. I'm very sure that a lot of what was said today is going to impact your view over the fire safety engineering of the buildings that you're involved in. I was the point. If you have some thoughts, please share them with me. Let's create a space where we can discuss the subject of having disabilities accounted in our fire safety strategies and evacuation and planning fire safety for buildings. That's something we absolutely need to do. In Poland, it just became required by law, so I'm happy to get from the best experiences of what's been happening around and, as I bring more people like this to the podcast, I will share more with you, learn more with you together, as the point of having the show after all. So thank you again for being here with me. Once again, thank you, mary, for this fantastic discussion and to all the listeners, see you here next Wednesday. Thank you, bye.