As a disabled person, this is one which comes up time and time
again in any public place. Only recently I was relieved to find that it
was just another false alarm when I was stranded on the sixth floor
of a hotel in the middle of the night - on that occassion it was a
member of the public who came back upstairs to inform me where
the refuge area was because there was no signage to it, and no
phones working to contact reception to ask.
Anyway, to put it bluntly I would far prefer to use an evacu chair at
the risk of contravening health and safety law instead of waiting for
the fire brigade to come and get me out of a burning building. Fire
evacuation procedures for disabled people are something which
desperately need looking at and, if it is necessary for disabled
people to wait til last to be evacuated (the general system) then
there should be very clear signage to refuge areas and assigned
fire marshalls to inform disabled people of what is going on instead
of my (and many disabled friends) usual approach in the absence
of clear procedures which is to find somewhere that looks safe and
wait til the alarm stops...scarey but true!
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