Abstract
With the increase of apartments and expansion of balcony areas, fire safety issues are becoming more important. Many researchers have conducted a lot of researches to reduce vertical flame spread in the balcony when an apartment unit is in fire. However, there have rarely been studies to use balcony area as a space for fire escape and evacuation. The study aims to examine the conditions of balcony use in apartments in order to find out prevention elements from fire escape and evacuation, and to investigate residents' satisfaction with balcony. For this study, questionnaires were collected from apartment residents and workers of architectural planning and construction companies. The findings show as follows: first, the balcony is generally used as a storage in each apartment unit nowadays. Second, when fire breaks out, many storage items could disturb residents' safe escape by blocking escape route, and easily promote to spread flame vertically in the balcony.
