ENHANCING THE SAFETY OF EVACUATION OF VISITORS OF SHOPPING AND ENTERTAINMENT CENTRES

Abstract

In the recent years, the service industry has been actively developing throughout the world. One of the services provided is children’s playrooms (children’s amusement parks) in shopping and entertainment centres. As a result, large groups of unaccompanied children can now be found in not only kindergartens or schools, where their composition is almost homogeneous, represented mainly by children, but also in children’s playrooms, where parents leave their children supervised by the staff of the shopping malls. When analysing scientific sources devoted to the study of the process of evacuation of people from buildings of different functional profiles in emergencies, conspicuous is the fact of poorly explored issues of evacuation of children and the impact of such features on the general evacuation process. The topic mentioned is described in detail in several scientific studies, and only in relation to the evacuation of children from preschools (Tsvirkun, 2020:3), (Shikhalev, 2013:5). There are reasonable concerns regarding the possibility of service staff to establish psychological contact with children in such a short time, to study the mental and behavioural characteristics of an individual child in case of danger, which is one of the main components of successful evacuation of children during a fire. It is not clear how children will behave if there is a real threat of exposure to fire hazards. Another aspect of the problem is the small amount of research on the parameters of the children evacuation process. In the absence of reliable data on the speed of movement, errors are likely when applying programs to calculate the evacuation parameters. There is no empirical data on the behaviour of children during the forced evacuation in case of fire in the premises of the shopping and entertainment centre. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that children’s playrooms (children’s amusement parks) are arranged not only on the first floors of shopping and entertainment complexes, but also on the second floors and higher.