81–90 of 309 posts
The easiest way to achieve this is probably external ladders for most buildings and putting disabled occupants on the ground floor or just in bungalows or something. Sheltered housing is pretty common in the UK.
A fully covered, fancy carpeted staircase seems OTT if its' purpose is basically to be a fire escape.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dozen extra staircases wouldn’t have done much to save people in Grenfell tower. They were instructed to stay in place, because when building regulations are followed, that’s the safest place to be. The problem with Grenfell was that building regulations had been violated, at which point, all bets about safety are off.
I could see a layperson like me thinking “yeah, thick concrete and fire doors; you’ll never need to fully evacuate”. I would expect architects, fire marshals, city planners, and other experts to see the obvious problem with this. Or at least one of them. It’a a single building. How do you build a plan around never needing to evacuate the place? It seems straightforward and appropriate to support a full evacuation str…
Particularly pertinent in the Covid era when we have seen what living on top of each other leads to.
Perhaps the solution is not to have apartments, and instead spread people and activity out across the country. Particularly pertinent in the Covid era when we have seen what living on top of each other leads to.
And since they're really financial instruments, the buildings are still only half full!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wood is very common in single story houses in the US. Large apartment buildings are made of concrete and steel. The tallest wood framed project I've seen was 3-4 stories with the first two concrete.
Fire codes were recently changed and now buildings with 4 or 5 wooden floors are becoming common: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
L?
I live in a London apartment building with a single staircase, which is standard here. The difference in principle seems to relate to “what happens when there’s a fire?”. Here, we don’t need to escape if there’s a fire in the building[1], because regulations demand walls, floors and doors that can withstand many hours of fire, which provides more than enough time for the fire service to attend and extinguish the fire…
"Stay in a building that's actively on fire, don't worry, people will come and take care of it!" sounds, to me as an American, like utter insanity. If the building is capable of withstanding it and the correct techniques are applied quickly, great, but "not in the building" is my strongly preferred place to be in the event of any sort of structure fire/damage/etc.
It's not that it can't work - it's just that when something major has gone wrong, history tends to show that lots of other things end up going wrong as well. Also, that "The building as designed" and "The building as built, after 40-50 years in service," frequently don't share as much as one might hope in terms of safety features.
There's a long recorded history of structure fires that have destroyed supposedly "fireproof" buildings. We might know more now, but in a battle between Murphy and engineering hubris, Murphy seems to find a lot of ways to win.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-2...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could see a layperson like me thinking “yeah, thick concrete and fire doors; you’ll never need to fully evacuate”. I would expect architects, fire marshals, city planners, and other experts to see the obvious problem with this. Or at least one of them. It’a a single building. How do you build a plan around never needing to evacuate the place? It seems straightforward and appropriate to support a full evacuation str…
In 2001 when the Twin Towers came down, people were trying to desert the building. Is there an analysis that shows they would have been just as safe in their offices?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dozen extra staircases wouldn’t have done much to save people in Grenfell tower. They were instructed to stay in place, because when building regulations are followed, that’s the safest place to be. The problem with Grenfell was that building regulations had been violated, at which point, all bets about safety are off.
I could see a layperson like me thinking “yeah, thick concrete and fire doors; you’ll never need to fully evacuate”. I would expect architects, fire marshals, city planners, and other experts to see the obvious problem with this. Or at least one of them. It’a a single building. How do you build a plan around never needing to evacuate the place? It seems straightforward and appropriate to support a full evacuation str…
Perhaps the solution is not to have apartments, and instead spread people and activity out across the country. Particularly pertinent in the Covid era when we have seen what living on top of each other leads to.