NABL - Fire Project

I started my sophomore year as the design lead of an emerging project with the NABL team. Partnering with Grant's House, a local non-profit that helps members of the community with various disabilities develop life, interpersonal and professional skills to help them live independently. Many of their members use mobility aids such as wheelchairs or crutches and cannot effectively access stairwells. In situations such as emergency evacuations from the second story of the building, this becomes an important accessibility issue. 

Globally, there is a system known as "areas of refuge" for situations such as this. Those who cannot access traditional evacuation routes, in this case, because they are inaccessible, are told to wait in a designated area of the building for the first responders to clear first. There are certainly a lot of ethical questions about this practice and our client we not comfortable with the practice and asked us to design a solution. 

​

Grant's House requested we design something to alter the existing stairways. However, after researching the regulations put in place by the ADA and ICC for accessibility, we decided that any design we put forward would explicitly violate multiple regulations and would be impossible and irresponsible to suggest. 

​

We decided to design a type of independently powered elevator that could be attached to any outer wall of the building so as to not disrupt the established evacuation routes. The system would be powered by a counterweight system or by a more modern generator-run system. We prototyped these systems but were unable to achieve full scale testing.

​

The implementation of these designs is obviously outside of our scope as students, as a result, this project lived in the conceptual realm for the majority of its life.  We were able to submit suggested designs for Grant's House to use if they decide to pursue this further with a licensed engineering team.