Which of your lifts are the emergency lifts? Nobody can tell by looking

Stand in the lift lobby of a tall building and you cannot tell which lifts are emergency lifts. They are not labelled, and nothing in the Code requires them to be. That is a strange state of affairs for a piece of equipment the fire brigade is meant to rely on.

What an emergency lift is

The National Construction Code sets out emergency lift requirements. In broad terms:

Any building with an effective height of 25 metres or more needs at least one emergency lift. A Class 9a health-care building needs one where the patient care area does not have direct egress to a road or open space. Every storey of a building that requires an emergency lift has to be served by one.

Where two or more passenger lifts are installed and they serve the same storeys, at least two of them must be emergency lifts. Where those lifts sit in different shafts, at least one in each shaft must be.

Emergency lifts must be in a fire-resisting shaft. In Class 9a buildings serving patient care areas there are minimum internal car dimensions and a minimum door width, measured clear of obstructions including handrails, and the lift must be connected to a standby power system where one is installed. Above 75 metres effective height there are minimum rated loads, higher again where the car is stretcher compliant.

The configuration question is the one people get wrong

The rule about lifts serving the same storeys sounds simple until you draw a real building. Take a triplex.

If all three lifts serve all the same floors, all three are emergency lifts. If one serves the full building and two serve an overlapping but shorter range, the full-travel lift plus one of the others must be emergency lifts. If the group splits into low rise and high rise with a common lift, the lifts at either end of the range carry it.

The point is that it is not always one lift, it is often not the biggest lift, and it is decided by which storeys each lift serves rather than by which one is nicest. On buildings where the group configuration changed during design, this is a common place for the emergency lift designation to be left behind at the old arrangement.

The electrical side is not optional either

The wiring rules treat lifts as a safety service. The wiring system has to keep supplying the lift when exposed to fire or mechanical damage, and conductors supplying safety services must be physically separated from other wiring systems, including other safety services, by a set distance or by suitable barriers.

Escalators and moving walks do not have to comply with the safety services requirements. Lifts in private residences do not either. Everything else does, and the separation requirement in particular is one that gets compromised in service risers years after handover, when somebody needs a spare pathway and takes the one that looks empty.

Nobody knows which lifts they are

Here is the practical problem. Emergency lifts are not labelled, and are not required to be. A warden intercom phone sits inside them, which is a clue if you know to look. Beyond that, the only record is in the fire engineering report and the design documentation, which is not where a fire officer is looking at two in the morning.

Emergency lift requirements and fire service requirements are also not uniquely related in the Code, which means a lift being on fire service does not tell you it is an emergency lift, and the two sets of requirements need to be checked separately.

The industry recommendation, and ours, is a label at or adjacent to the fire alarm panel setting out which lifts are emergency lifts and which floors each one serves. Something as plain as: Emergency Lift 1, serves floors G to 7. Emergency Lift 2, serves floors G to 6. Lettering to the same standard the Code already sets for passenger lift warning signs.

It costs almost nothing, it lives where the brigade will actually see it, and it forces somebody to confirm the answer while the building is calm.

What we would check on your building

Confirm the effective height and whether the emergency lift requirement is triggered at all. Confirm which lifts were designated, from the documentation rather than from memory. Compare that against the storeys each lift currently serves, because lift groups get reconfigured and floors get added.

Check the shaft fire rating and, in health-care buildings, measure the car clear of handrails rather than reading the nominal size off a drawing. Check the standby power connection is real and gets tested. Check the warden intercom phones work, because they are tested less often than anyone assumes.

Then put the label up.

The Australian Elevator Association sets out the references and makes the labelling recommendation in its Industry Position Paper IPP-08, Emergency Lifts Defined. The reading here is ours, and specific buildings are worth confirming against the current Code edition rather than against this article.

General information only. Emergency lift designation is a documentation exercise on a specific building, not something to work out by inspection.