Sharon O'connor on evacuation
From CTBUH 2012 Shanghai Congress - O'Connor, "Considerations for Refuge Areas in Tall Buildings" · · CTBUH
“One of the concerns I have is how are all these people being trained and thinking in the evacuation process? Are they being told to go to the Refuge floor? Is it really fair to move those folks into their Refuge floor right above the fire? I would suggest it would have been better to have just left this population on the floors where they were in the building.”
On , Sharon O'connor, Vice President of Legal Services at CORVEL CORP, spoke about evacuation during CTBUH 2012 Shanghai Congress - O'Connor, "Considerations for Refuge Areas in Tall Buildings" on CTBUH.
About Sharon O'connor
Sharon O'Connor, Vice President of Legal Services at Corvel, presented at the 2012 CTBUH Shanghai Congress on considerations for refuge areas in tall buildings. She discussed the financial and sustainability impacts of refuge floors, noting costs such as additional construction time, cleaning, HVAC, loss of efficiency, and impacts on leasing plans. O'Connor suggested that in fully sprinklered buildings, most floors could serve as refuge space, and advocated for redirecting cost savings from not building refuge floors toward sprinkler system reliability, testing, and maintenance. She described sprinklers as an "on-demand firefighter" and emphasized the need for regular maintenance to ensure reliability. O'Connor also raised concerns about human behavior in fires, including potential overcrowding on refuge floors and the risk of moving occupants to a refuge floor directly above a fire. She reported feedback from her fire safety working group that people often ignore refuge floors and do not use them. Additionally, she characterized helicopter evacuation from rooftops as a "very high-risk strategy," citing obstacles such as thick smoke, flight safety, weather, turbulence, and the risk of helicopter crashes in urban settings.