Stepping up - and down - for safety

Randy Styner, UC Irvine director of emergency management, is no stranger to disaster. In 1976, at age 8, he was involved in a plane crash in rural Nebraska that claimed the life of his mother and injured him, his three siblings and his father.

So when Styner's colleague Andrew Berk, the campus's Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator, contacted him about a student who uses a wheelchair requesting a personalized emergency evacuation plan, Styner analyzed what that would entail.

"The student reached out to us because they were assigned to a laboratory on one of the upper floors of a building," he says. "That got us thinking about individuals who might need a higher level of planning and accessibility - where the standard process to evacuate a building won't work - and saw it as an opportunity to develop something."

In 2019, the first Stryker evacuation "stair chair" was installed in Sue & Bill Gross Nursing and Health Sciences Hall. Together, Styner and Berk rewrote the university's emergency operations plan to incorporate accessibility into all levels of planning.

"One of these evacuation chairs can be the difference between whether someone with a disability lives or dies during an emergency," Berk says.

Through an assessment process that included commissioning a consultant to conduct an evacuation route analysis, he and Styner were able to utilize the findings to redesign assembly areas and determine the necessary steps for safe and timely evacuations.

In June of this year, 282 Stryker stair chairs were installed in 56 academic and administrative buildings on campus. Stored in bright green, wall-mounted steel cabinets, the chairs - which can carry up to 500 pounds - are available in the stairwells of every multilevel building. They come with instructions attached and require an operator to guide the chair and the person seated in it down the steps.

"Evacuation stair chairs are not the catchall solution. They're a tool in what needs to be a comprehensive emergency evacuation plan," says Styner, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. "Accessibility is something that you continually improve upon."

Students and faculty are encouraged to learn how to use these chairs through a two-part training - a 10-minute video followed by an in-person, hands-on session - offered by request and via drop-in hours. The next drop-in training will take place in September, after the new quarter begins.

"It gives individuals an opportunity to sit in the chair, put the straps on, play with the levers, roll it around and see how easy it is to use," says Dilon Reynolds, training and exercise coordinator. "We're really trying to get as many people trained as possible, so that if there was ever a situation where chairs needed to be used, people would feel comfortable using them."

Styner says people can request training or create an individualized emergency evacuation plan by contacting Emergency Management, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity or Human Resources. "Our job is not only making sure the campus is ready for disasters but also showing people how to manage an incident on their own and making sure they know what to do," he says.

Berk adds that numerous factors are considered so that emergency planning is inclusive. The next phase, he says, is developing signage in buildings "to ensure that accessible routes are not just designated but marked."

"There are always going to be accessibility issues," says Berk, overlooking a staircase. "But Randy and I approach issues two ways: We listen, and we adapt. When someone comes to us with a question, our mindset [is] not 'Can we do that?' but 'How do we do that?'"