Most households with a stairlift have never asked what happens in a fire. It is an uncomfortable question with straightforward answers.
At home: the hard rule
Do not use a stairlift to evacuate. It is slow, it may be in the path of smoke, and it may not be reachable.
That is not a criticism of the equipment. It is a machine for daily use, not egress, and it takes far longer than the situation allows.
Plan for a ground floor exit
Somebody who cannot use stairs should ideally sleep on the ground floor, with a route to a door that they can use unaided.
That is a bigger conversation than fire safety and it is frequently the right answer anyway. Our accessibility guide covers reorganising to one floor.
Where that is not possible, the plan is a refuge: a room with a door that closes, a window, and a phone. Close the door, call the fire service, tell them exactly which room. Fire services plan for this.
The cheap things that matter most
- Interlinked smoke alarms. One sounding means all sounding, which matters when somebody cannot get downstairs to check.
- A phone kept on the person, not on a charger across the room.
- A torch by the bed.
- Keys where they always are, so nobody hunts for them at a door.
- Tell the fire service in advance. Many will record that somebody with limited mobility lives at an address, and many offer a free home safety visit.
That last one is the highest-value item on this page and almost nobody does it.
Practice it
Once. Not as a drill, as a conversation walked through in daylight. Which room, which door, who calls, where the phone is.
Somebody who has walked it once will not be deciding it at three in the morning.
In a workplace or public building
The standard here is a written plan per person rather than a general one, agreed with them rather than about them.
Refuge areas, evacuation chairs with trained operators, and two-way communication so somebody waiting knows they have not been forgotten. An evacuation chair with nobody trained on it is decoration.
The Access Board covers accessible routes, and an accessible route in is not automatically a route out.
Lifts and elevators
Standard elevators are not used in a fire. Firefighting and evacuation lifts exist and are a different specification with a protected shaft and power supply.
If a building relies on a platform lift or an elevator for access, the evacuation plan has to work without it. Our school guide asks the same question of districts, and it is the one most often unanswered.
Ask the question out loud
If the alarm goes now, what happens? If the answer involves somebody being carried down a staircase by whoever is nearest, that is the gap, and it is fixable with planning rather than equipment.
Smoke alarms, torches, personal alarms and smaller equipment ship free from our online shop.
Smoke alarms for people who cannot hear them
Standard alarms assume somebody wakes to sound. Where hearing is impaired, strobe and vibrating pad alarms exist and go under the pillow.
They cost more than a standard alarm and far less than the alternative, and they are the single most overlooked item in a house where somebody cannot hear a smoke detector at night.
Where equipment is stored
A rollator or a wheelchair parked in a hallway is fine daily and is an obstacle in a smoke-filled corridor. Keep the route to the exit clear of the equipment that exists to help somebody use it.
Keep a wheelchair within reach of the bed rather than across the room, for the same reason a phone should be.
Tell them in advance
Many fire services will note at dispatch that somebody with limited mobility lives at an address, and many run free home safety visits that include alarms fitted at no cost.
One phone call, and it is the highest-value item on this page. Our home safety checklist covers the rest of the walk-through.
Carbon monoxide too
Same argument, different hazard. Somebody who spends most of the day in one room, particularly a room with a heater, needs a detector in that room rather than only in a hallway.
Medication and paperwork
A list of medications and conditions, kept somewhere a responder will find it, is worth having for every emergency rather than just a fire. A note on the fridge is the traditional place and it works.
Include who to call and any equipment somebody depends on, because a responder arriving to a house with a ceiling track or an oxygen concentrator wants to know before they start.
Review it when anything changes
New equipment, a new bedroom, reduced hearing, a new diagnosis. Any of those changes the plan, and our home walk-through is a reasonable prompt to revisit it.
Evacuation chairs, and the part people skip
An evacuation chair is a wheeled chair with tracks or braked skids that lets one or two people take somebody down a staircase in a controlled way. They live in a bracket in a stairwell and they cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
The part that gets skipped is training. An evacuation chair with nobody trained on it is a wall ornament, and using one untrained on a staircase with somebody in it is genuinely dangerous.
Training should cover getting somebody into it, controlling the descent, what to do at a landing turn, and how to stop. It should be refreshed, because the people trained two years ago have moved on.
Refuge areas
A protected space, usually a fire-resisting stairwell landing, where somebody waits for assisted evacuation. What makes it a refuge rather than a corner is two-way communication, so the person knows they have been accounted for.
That communication matters more than the space. Waiting alone in a stairwell with no way to tell anybody you are there is the failure mode people describe afterward.
Writing a plan per person
In a workplace, the standard is a plan written with the individual rather than about them. It names who assists, the route, the refuge if there is one, and what happens if the named person is away that day.
That last clause is the one most often missing and the one that fails in practice.
At home, three things worth doing this week
- Call the fire service and ask about a home safety visit and whether they record mobility needs at an address.
- Check every smoke alarm, and add one in the room where somebody spends most of the day.
- Walk the route, in daylight, once, with whoever else lives there.
None of it costs anything and all of it is more useful than any product we sell.
Put it on one page
Who does what, which room, which door, which number to call. Stuck inside a kitchen cupboard door where everybody sees it and nobody has to look for it.
A plan that lives in somebody’s head is a plan that only works if that person is home.