I've been to a few older office towers where the plan was basically "in the event of a fire, people who can't walk down stairs will die horribly, so those people are not allowed above the ground floor."

Having a coworker with one leg, it meant a lot of shuffling meetings around to get the meeting room on the ground floor, but they were very meticulous about it.

places of refuge

Ohh so that’s what that means. I see those signs on the stairwells of my office building and wasn’t sure what it actually meant.

When I worked in a high rise we had floor fire wardens per office, and we had to have a plan on who would carry injured or otherwise immobile people down the stairs. I had an ankle surgery at one point and had a designated carrier, and a secondary for when they were out of office.

To add to this, modern commercial buildings are built with specifically engineered "fire partitions" throughout the structure, such as stairwells and egress pathways. In the most critical areas these are usually 2 or 3 hour rated, meaning that they are designed to withstand a structural fire for 2 to 3 hours before becoming compromised.

In America at least, modern commercial construction is exceptionally fire-resistant.

Source: I build hospitals.

This makes a lot of sense. There's a person in our building who has a limitation in his movement who I noticed works on the first floor. I only saw him going into the building (rather than out) once, but he entered a space on the first floor and a security guard held the door for him. I wondered, at the time, if that was a deliberate accommodation: if someone who can't operate a heavy door works right next to the security checkpoint, there will always be someone available to hold it for them. Thanks!

My university used to have a bag thing that was made to slide people down the stairs.

They repeatedly asked me if it would require it in case of emergency but since arthritis makes walking painful but not impossible, especially when adrenaline kicks in and my choices are pain or a fiery death, I never had to practice with the thing.

My high-school was build against a hill luckily but since some of the evacuation included leaving through the windows if the hallway is on fire I'm assuming the idea was to lift disabled people through it.