Can your lift take a stretcher? Most buildings find out at the worst time
Every building has an evacuation plan. Very few have checked whether the lift car is big enough to get a person out on a stretcher, which is the only part of the plan that matters to the person on the stretcher.
Two words doing a lot of work
Design guidance for vertical transportation asks the design practitioner to show how the design handles emergency evacuation for ambulant and non-ambulant people. A non-ambulant person is somebody who, through disability or injury, cannot use the stairs, and who in some cases has to be moved on a stretcher.
The guidance does not say what a design has to include to satisfy that. There is no minimum car size attached to the phrase, no dimension, no test. A practitioner is asked to declare that the design accords with the guidance material, and the guidance material leaves the substance to judgement.
Our position, and the industry position, is straightforward. If you are going to answer yes, the lift car needs to be sized to take a non-ambulant person on a stretcher.
Where the Code already agrees with you
This is not an invention. The National Construction Code already requires a stretcher facility where passenger lifts serve any storey above an effective height of 12 metres, in at least one of the lifts serving each of those floors. Roughly, four storeys above entry.
The Code has decided at that point that stairs are no longer a reliable way to get an incapacitated person down. Everything else follows from that. If the Code has accepted stretcher access is necessary, a design that provides a lift too small to hold a stretcher has not solved the problem the Code identified.
The failure modes we actually see
The stretcher lift exists but does not serve every floor. A triplex where two lifts serve the whole building and the third, larger car serves the podium levels only. Somebody has ticked stretcher facility. The person on level 19 is not covered by it.
The car is nominally compliant and practically not. Internal dimensions measured to the shell, not clear of handrails, skirting and the door reveal. A stretcher does not care about the nominal dimension. Ambulance crews carry equipment as well as a patient, and they need to be in the car with them.
Nobody has ever tried it. This is the common one. The dimension is on a drawing from 2011. No one has taken a stretcher into the car, tilted it, and found out whether it goes in. It costs an hour to test and it is the only real evidence you will ever have.
The plan assumes the fire brigade. Evacuation plans routinely assume emergency services will manage non-ambulant occupants. Emergency services will do exactly that, using whatever the building gives them. If what the building gives them is a stairwell and a chair, that is what happens, and it takes a great deal longer.
The other half of the same clause
The same design guidance asks about access for plant and materials, including safe lifting points, hatches, and car loading and size to suit the building plant that has to be moved. That sounds like a facilities issue rather than a life safety one, and it is treated as the poor relation. It should not be.
Plant that cannot be moved by lift gets moved another way, and the other ways are cranes, stairs and disassembly. Every one of those is expensive, and every one of them tends to be discovered at the point a chiller has failed and the building needs it back. A car sized for the largest plant item that will have to be replaced during the building’s life is a cheap decision at design stage and an impossible one afterwards.
What to do if the building already exists
Find out, physically. Get a stretcher, get it into the car, and record the result with photographs and dimensions. Do it for each lift, and note which floors each one serves.
If a car will not take a stretcher, that is not automatically a defect to be rectified, but it is a fact your evacuation plan has to be written around rather than against. The plan should name which lift is used, which floors it reaches, what happens on the floors it does not reach, and who is responsible for making the call. Give the fire brigade the same information in the building’s emergency documentation, not on the night.
Where a modernisation is coming up, car size is one of the few things you can change at that point and almost never afterwards. It is worth raising before the scope is fixed, because it will not be raised for you.
The Australian Elevator Association addresses this in its Industry Position Paper IPP-02, Emergency Evacuation for Ambulant and Non-Ambulant People. The practical framing here is ours.
General information only. Whether a specific car can take a specific stretcher is a question to answer by measuring, not by reading.