Morning All,
I had an interesting moment yesterday in a large shopping centre. Lots of alarms going off and a recorded message saying "the fire alarms have been activated and the shopping centre staff are investigating - please listen for further announcements"
Some shops asked shoppers to leave and put staff at the doors, some closed their shutters and most continued trading as if all was well with the world.
Now for me, as an ex submariner and now working in large industrial sites, alarms mean "somethings wrong, you need to do something" but obviously there are commercial drivers at work too in a shopping mall. Could someone enlighten me to the way the mall management deal with this sort of scenario etc - I'm not looking to criticise but it would be interesting to know for various reasons not least of which is unit C of the diploma and the fire modules.
(By the way, the alarms drove me out of the building because they annoyed me but most people seemed completely at ease with the noise or perhaps chose to ignore it as there was no smoke or smell of burning....)
Cheers,
Jim

I've no experience of shopping malls except as a customer, but our 9-storey office building operates phased evac, and our experience is probably similar.

If you try to evacuate all nine floors at once, the bottom couple of flights of stairs would quickly clog up with nine floors worth of people all trying to get out at once - as would the roads outside the final exit doors. I know the fire exits have to be adequate to take the number of people - but phased evac is part of the process for ensuring that.

If an alarm is triggered, the floor where the trigger is immediately gets the "please leave at once" message, while everyone else gets the "We are currently investigating an alarm condition and it may be necessary to evacuate - please listen for further announcements". Then after a specified time delay, each of the floors above the fire is cleared in turn, followed by each of the floors below the fire. The whole thing is planned to ensure that the people most at risk can leave as quickly as possible.

As an aside, at the moment we evacuate mobility-restricted people (using approved fire elevators) as soon as the pre-alarm goes, regardless of which floor they're on. We can do that at the moment as we only have a couple and we can get them out first without slowing anyone else's escape.

Phased evac isn't ideal, but if you imagine somewhere the size of Bluewater trying to evacuate everyone at once - for what might be a comparitively minor waste bin fire, shut away in a well-compartmented unit - it's easy to imagine panic and crush causing worse injuries than the fire could have done. Phased evac is probably the best way to manage the situation, although in the situation ExDeeps describes I'd comment:

1) It would be much better if what we call the pre-alarm said something like "We are currently investigating an alarm condition..." rather than "The fire alarm has been triggered..." - there's nothing like the F word to stimulate panic, although it sounds like just the opposite happened this time!

2) It would be much better to have a unified response from the shop staff throughout the mall, so that everyone in the "pre-alarm zone" was doing the same thing - whether that's business as normal or putting up the shutters.

Hope these comments are helpful...

Julian, Paul & Phil,

Guys, thanks for the replies - it's obviouse really, I just didn't think it through;
Phased evacuation - to avoid a mad, uncontrolled rush at the doors with potential accidents,
Fire zones to contain the fire - sometimes the safest action is to stay where you are as the residents of Shirley Towers were instructed to do last week when two of Hampshire's finest were tragically killed.

One observation on the shops that closed up their shutters - it was the ones with high value stock such as jewellers who were shutting not the large M&S types.....Commercial drivers to stop an opportunistic theft I suppose,
Cheers,
Jim

Sorry if this is a bit late, but I too only have first hand experience as a customer at Meadowhall, Sheffield. The affected area was evacuated. However, as a fire risk assessor & H&S Advisor in a large employer, I have some difficulty with this where there are (apparently) no smoke doors to partition areas off to prevent smoke from spreading in the event of a serious fire. Smoke logging could easily & remarkably quickly affect other areas, though this should trigger the alarms elsewhere leading to further evacuation. The design of the building & facilites contained in it, e.g. smoke venting, would all play a part in the final policy. Where it's a small compartmentalised fire, local evacuation should prove to be sufficient on the day. A major store, (e.g. M&S or House of Fraser store) on fire would almost without doubt demand total evacuation.

Ideally shops should make allowances for this type of response from customers and have the staff trained to get people out of the shop. this is where voice alarms work so much better when it comes to members of the public as it is clear what is happening and it's not just someone ringing the the bell for the back door.

On an equal not i was shopping in tesco when they had a fire alarm i went for the nearest exit to find they now have magnetic locks on the doors. you have open a tamper evident cover before you can get to the button to release the doors. I can understand this in some situation but they seem to install them as standard rather then based on if the doors have bee used for improper purposes before. Also a member of staff tried to stop me from using these doors. I quickly explained that's a fire alarm and these are fire exit doors. Lol

Phil