The buildings and the built environment in general play a key role in supporting business
activities and delivering economic prosperity for the corporation and society in general. Buildings
are designed to provide the essential elements of an enclosed workspace, which affords physical
security and a barrier to the elements. There are increasing occasions when these simple functions
are rattled or distorted by disasters. However, catastrophic disasters such as fire disasters have made
organisations to devote greater attention to emergency preparedness in order to protect employees,
customers, properties and business continuity. Achieving this goal requires that management and
information systems are available to facilitate the recover}' of core business operations. While
safeguarding systems and arranging for substitutes is vital, it is equally important to ensure the
availability of proper human capacity to operate these systems and behave under adverse emergency
conditions. This paper therefore aimed to study impact of human characteristics on fire accidents and
develop a conceptual model for strengthening the human capacity to respond fire disaster in industrial
buildings. A comprehensive literature review was used as research methodology for this research
paper. Key words such as fire disaster, human characteristics, emergency management programme
and industrial buildings were used to search the literature. Literature findings revealed that probability
of fire occurrences in factory buildings is higher than other industrial building categories. Many
factories do not arrange regular drill, awareness programme etc.; therefore, the workers discover
themselves in an alien situation whenever an emergency situation arises, causing panic, stampede etc.
which further escalate the degree of casualty. Also, the cause analysis for most of the fire accidents in
industrial buildings shows that many accidents have occurred due to technical and human failures
where human failures include lack of awareness of the safety precautions required, inadequate expert
knowledge and qualifications in accident prevention, poor guidance and behaviour of the personnel in
the building either before or during the incident. Based on the literature findings, a conceptual model
is developed and the finding of this research will be a guideline to propose a better working condition
so that the strong fire safety environment can be created.
Keywords: Fire Disaster, Human Characteristics, Emergency Management
