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Which way do people leave if one day they have to?

The fire exit is behind six pallets

It is 10:20 on a Tuesday in the despatch bay. A lorry arrives with more on it than expected and six pallets have to go somewhere. The handiest gap is the one in front of the green door, that yellow square that is always empty. They go there, just for a moment. The afternoon lorry brings four more. By Friday nobody sees the pallets any more: they are part of the aisle.

6 cameras across 6 sectors

This is how you ask for it

«Tell me when something is left in front of the fire exit for more than ten minutes.»

Nobody writes it in any report, because nothing happened. What does happen is that on inspection day three people spend two hours clearing aisles, and the safety report closes with a finding that was already fixed by the time it was signed. And if one day people really have to get out, the nearest door is useless and everyone heads for the next one, forty metres away.

You decide once

You decide this once and it applies from then on. The site decides where the square that must stay clear is, how many minutes something may sit there and who gets told. If an object appears inside that area, for more than ten minutes, and nobody is working with it, then an incident opens, the camera is sent and the image is kept. It gets written on a Tuesday morning and runs every day, including the Saturday when the office is empty.

A fire exit is never blocked all at once. It gets blocked a moment at a time. A pallet, a cleaning trolley, an empty cage, a box someone will move later. Everyone walks past it fifteen times a day and stops seeing it, because whatever is always there is no longer an obstacle: it is part of the floor. On inspection day it is cleared in twenty minutes and everybody breathes out. A month later the pallets are back.

The day it goes wrong there is no time to clear anything. Smoke comes up in a public area and people head, all at once, for the nearest door. If that door has six pallets in front of it, it is not an exit: it is a plug with a green light above it. In a car park it is a car parked over the hatching. In a school it is a stack of chairs at the foot of the stairs. It is always something someone left, and it has always been there longer than anyone remembers.

IRIS watches the square in front of the door and nothing else. If something appears and is still there after the agreed minutes, it says so: camera, time and image. It is not an urgent alert, it is a boring one, the kind you fix today with a pallet truck. And that is the whole point: the exit gets cleared on Tuesday afternoon instead of on the morning of the inspection.

What changes

Before, this turned up on the monthly safety walk or on the day the inspector came. Someone wrote aisle obstructed on a sheet and the photo got taken once it was already clear. Now the site manager gets the image at 10:35 with the door and the time, sends someone with a pallet truck, and by 10:50 it is done. The same finding that used to take a month closes in a quarter of an hour.

Where we have seen it

  • Mid-morning in the dispatch area. In front of the exit door there are six pallets of boxes stacked shoulder-high, two metal cages and a tool trolley. On the floor, a bundle of steel tubes lies across the yellow strip. An operator has stopped in front of it with his arms out: there is no way through. The door is open and nobody can reach it. IRIS sees that the marked zone has been occupied since first thing.

    CAM-255The emergency exit is behind six pallets

    «Tell me when something is left in the yellow zone in front of the exit for more than ten minutes.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • Early afternoon at the end of aisle 8. Somebody has left four pallets of boxes right against the emergency door: they cover half the leaf, the extinguisher and the fire hose cabinet. The green exit sign is still lit above, pointing at a door that cannot be opened. An orange forklift manoeuvres alongside and a worker walks past. IRIS sees goods standing inside the zone that must always be kept clear.

    CAM-274Pallets in front of the emergency exit

    «Tell me when there are goods in front of the emergency exit or covering the extinguisher for more than five minutes.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • Smoke is coming out of a service corridor, next to the café. Three metres away is the emergency door, and in front of it stand a cage of boxes and a cleaning trolley: they have been there for eighteen minutes. Facing it, some sixty people have stopped and are looking towards the smoke, while on the other side people are already walking out. Two things at once, and both equally serious.

    CAM-546There is smoke, and the exit people would have to use is blocked

    «Tell me if there is smoke in a public area, or if an emergency exit has had something in front of it for more than five minutes.»

    See this camera →Shopping centres

  • Night on level -2. A grey SUV is stopped with its nose in the opening of the emergency exit, on top of the green area painted on the floor with the running figure. The stairs can be seen behind the door. A few metres away, out on the aisle, a man is lying face down, still. The lighting is poor and much of the frame is dark. IRIS sees all three things at once: the route blocked, the area without light and somebody motionless where nobody lies down.

    CAM-474The emergency exit blocked by a car and a person on the ground

    «Alert me if anyone parks on the emergency exit or if there is a person on the ground not moving.»

    See this camera →Car parks

  • Afternoon work next to the shed. On the asphalt there is a strip marked with red cross-hatching that has to stay clear at all times, and a red hydrant standing beside it. Right now the strip is taken: a blue skip overflowing with bags, a green one behind it, a stack of pallets and cardboard boxes on the ground, and loose black bags. A worker in helmet and hi-vis is photographing the scene with his phone. IRIS sees the emergency lane occupied.

    CAM-437The emergency lane is packed with skips and pallets

    «Tell me if anybody leaves something on the painted emergency lane or in front of the hydrant.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • A stair landing inside the building. At the back, the green fire door with its sign above it. Right against the leaves: a trolley of balls, a blue recycling bin, a crate, two stacks of cardboard boxes and four backpacks on the floor. On the right, a wooden cabinet pushed up against the door; on the left, classroom tables and chairs stacked up. A group of pupils is standing right in the middle of the passage. Down the stairs, the exit route carries on.

    CAM-137The fire exit, blocked

    «Tell me if anything is left standing in front of a fire exit or in a stairway passage, and tell me today, not in six months' time.»

    See this camera →The school

What it does not do

IRIS does not know whether what sits in front of the door will be moved in five minutes or whether it is goods in transit. It sees that the marked area is occupied and it counts the time.

Nor does it measure in centimetres the clear width the rules demand, or replace a safety officer’s inspection. A person does that, with a tape measure in hand.

Questions

Does it alert even for a pallet that is only passing through?
No. The rule has a clock, not a switch: while someone is working with those goods, they move, and no alert arrives. It only fires when something has stayed there longer than the agreed minutes, usually between five and ten. The problem is never the pallet passing through: it is the one that stays over the weekend. If loading takes longer in your building, you raise the margin and IRIS only mentions what has genuinely settled.
Does it cover fire lanes and extinguishers too?
Yes, and it is exactly the same kind of rule. You mark on the image the painted fire lane, the hatching in front of a hydrant or the space kept for an extinguisher, and you ask for an alert if something settles on it. This is the kind of lapse nobody writes into a report and that gets discovered on the day it is needed, when there is no fixing it any more.
Does it replace the safety inspection?
No. The inspection keeps doing what it does well: checking widths, signage, emergency lighting and the state of the doors. What IRIS adds is the rest of the month, the thirty days when nobody walks round with a checklist. The walk tells you whether the exit is well designed; IRIS tells you whether it is clear today. Two different questions, and you need both.
Can you find out how often the same exit gets blocked?
Yes, and it is usually the figure that fixes the problem at its root. Every alert is stored with its time and its door, so by the end of the month you can see that one particular exit gets blocked nine times and the others never. That is not careless people: that door has nowhere to put pallets. Change where the drop zone is and the alerts stop on their own.

See all the questions

Every simulation

Something has spilled

Tell me if there is liquid or foam outside its place and it is still there two minutes later.

  1. The sentence
  2. Where it applies
  3. What it finds
  4. The same rule
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