In a seminar paper entitled "Emergency Egress Capabilities of People with Mixed Abilities" presented at the 2nd International Conference on Safety in Road and Tail Tunnels many issues including; the prevalence of disability, mobility and behaviours of people with physical and sensory impairments, evacuee evacuation capability profiles, use of public and private transport by disabled people and emergency planning for tunnels were discussed. It was postulated in [1] that tunnels by their very nature added new dimensions and complexities to the process of emergency evacuations in the event of fire. People confronted with fire in a tunnel or other subterranean space could be expected to be familiar with what is in essence an alien environment in terms of means of escape and places of refuge etc. further the conceptual models of human behaviour in fire in buildings currently in use and being developed might not be valid for subterranean spaces. For design purposes the concept of occupancy is introduced here as a potential analytical tool for use in the creation of safer environments. A fundamental behaviour Concept which is often overlooked in our engineering model of the built environment is: R = f(E) ie the responses, actions and behaviours of individuals in time and space are a function of E, the environment in which they find themselves. Thus the focus should be an occupancy not just occupant and tunnel characteristics. Occupancy in the context of this paper is: "the constraints on, conditions prevailing, possibilities of knowledge and action afforded by the social, organisational and physical locations occupied by people over time". The concept of occupancy is the bridge between engineering and environmental psychology. Thus built environments are not something without their innate complexities which are created by architecture, function or rapidly changing prevailing conditions as in a fire emergency. Developing the notion of complex environments in the context of tunnels there are, what are known as, transit tunnels, road tunnels, rail tunnels and other tunnels, e.g., canal or waterway tunnels. Further, tunnels have distinguishing features, i.e., they may be single bore unidirectional, single bore bi-directional, double/triple bore unidirectional, etc., thus, for fire emergencies in tunnels there may be a serious complexity issue that must be understood and addressed at the design stage, i.e., the characterisation of the setting; the developing fire scenario; traffic flows; human behaviour; fire evacuation and rescue dynamics. These complex relations can be addressed by the designers and managers of systems, if they understand and apply the basic behavioural concept outlined previously.
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