Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre-movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents.

SUMMARY The Lateral Ignition and Flame Spread Test (LIFT) is used to characterize fire ignition and flame spread on solid materials. This test requires the operator to visually monitor the flame spread over a combustible material and manually record the position of the flame during an experiment. Visual inspection limits the quantity of data obtained from a test and introduces uncertainty in the measurement. In this study, we use narrow-spectrum light with a peak wavelength of 450 nm and a digital camera with frequency-matched optical filters to capture images of surface charring, which underlies the flaming combustion, in a LIFT apparatus. The imaging technique reduced unwanted energy emissions from the flame in the visible light spectrum, allowing the test operator to directly view the charring of the material; which is otherwise hidden behind the flames. We describe data processing routines to analyze the sequences of high-resolution images. The method improves temporal and spatial resolution of the surface charring compared to visual observations.

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