SFPE Guide to Human Behavior in Fire

This single resource for the fire safety community distills the most relevant and useful science and research into a consensus-based guide whose key factors and considerations impact the response and behavior of occupants of a building during a fire event.

This Guide also aims to lessen the uncertainties in the "people components" of fire safety and allow for more refined analysis with less reliance on arbitrary safety factors. As with fire science in general, our knowledge of human behavior in fire is growing, but is still characterized by uncertainties that are traceable to both limitation in the science and unfamiliarity by the user communities. The concepts for development of evacuation scenarios for performance-based designs and the technical methods to estimate evacuation response are reviewed with consideration to the limitation and uncertainty of the methods. This Guide identifies both quantitative and qualitative information that constitutes important consideration prior to developing safety factors, exercising engineering judgment, and using evacuation models in the practical design of buildings and evacuation procedures. Besides updating material in the First Edition, this revision includes new information on: