271–280 of 309 posts
I'm curious why they don't just make one open-air stairway, and build ladders into the buildings' walls. Multiple permanent ventilated escape methods.
Can you imagine hundreds of people trying to rapidly descend ladders. A good chuck of the population physically couldn’t do it. Not to mention mistakes from the rush. And to actually save space you would have to make these ladder decent zones very small which would be dangerous itself.
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The problem isn't only a potential panic. While the people are evacuating, how does the fire brigade get to where they need to combat the fire in the apartment?
This is sort of a comical response. The building is engulfed in flames and plan is to keep the stairwells clear. If the concrete and fire doors are doing their supposed job, then the fire brigade can just wait. If the concrete and fire doors are not doing their job, then getting people out is far more important than getting the fire brigade in.
Wait until the people in the apartment on fire die? (Either it starts in an apartment, or a common are which would block the escape of inhabitants living on there or higher)
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If an accelerant is used that is continuously burned until exhausted , then I'm not sure it matters where or what materials are present. If there is a fire at an exit that persists and is difficult to extinguish, said arsonist can then move to the next exit, and perform the same action. Thus blocking multiple exits while acting as a single individual. That's my point.
But hopefully the fire alarms are causing an evacuation and those using the other door will stop someone from going in
I live in a three bedroom ranch-style home and designed the floorplan myself. Every room save for my bathroom and my office has two egress routes and they all have windows. I’m sure a statistical analysis could be constructed to justify the decision to eliminate two stairwells. I wouldn’t be interested in living there.
Do you talked about the floor plan and the reasoning behind it somewhere? It might be interesting.
Having two young girls at the time i wanted to avoid that. We also built out in the middle of the woods and i wanted to maximize our mobility in case anyone decided they could break in without getting caught (in fact you could bulldoze our house without getting caught) Everything else flowed from that.
One interesting side effect is that i can put an exhaust fan in a window of my office and by closing select doors can pull fresh air through the entire house by cracking two other windows open.
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As always, you have to balance the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack with the (opportunity) cost of building additional escape routes.
> As always, you have to balance the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack with the (opportunity) cost of building additional escape routes. A "crazy trap-setting knifeman attack" is not the only scenario that results in a blocked exit trapping people inside the building in a life-threatening situation. Think about it for a second. Imagine, for instance, that a fire breaks out for any reason. Is this unthinkab…
Yes, past lessons should be remembered but it looks like there is no data that would support building double staircases in reality - it's just too rare of a problem. Same reason why almost nowhere in the world requires outside fire exits like many buildings in NYC do - they are great in idea and I'm sure there are examples of them saving lives, but it's not worth making them a requirement for every building ever made.
Architects (and society) should periodically question the layers of safety codes that define our art, architecture and design. It didn't occur to me that staircases in these large apartments are /required/ to be shut off from the hallways, and have a permanent feel of "fire escape". They are not a part of the building, they are acoustically unpleasant, and all-around a bore. Imagine an apartment building with curved,…
A lot of People have died over the years from that kind of design - which is why it isn’t used any more. It can quickly turn a first floor smoldering fire into a whole building conflagration.
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1. People survive crashes at highway speeds in the US literally every day, at 60mph and above. 2. 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle. The way with which a vehicle’s momentum at 60mph is dissipated makes a critical difference to the crash energy imparted on the occupants. Road design has greatly improved this in recent decades. 3. Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents f…
> Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes. Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash > 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle. The force imparted on you in a 60mph crash by the seatbelt will be lethal no matter how much deceleration space you have. You got at 27 meters per second, and you only have at a maximum 1 meter to dec…
It counts as making cars safer which was the above claim I am supporting.
> you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.
Most vehicle crashes are not head-on incidents.
Improvements in road design have affected the proportion of crashes that are head-on. Recent improvements in active safety features may decrease this further: eg. lane departure mitigation.
In many real-world accidents, vehicles have dozens or hundreds of meters to decelerate.
I live in an apartment with 2 staircases, an elevator, and a fire escape. Several months ago, there was a fire in a first floor apartment that blocked me from using ALL of them, via either unbreathable smoke or flames. I ended up just hiding in my room until the fire department dealt with it. I'm not sure whether this argues for more staircases or fewer. (In hindsight I did have other options, but this was my first f…
For the benefit of other people who haven't been in a serious building fire: what were your other options?
Based on my experience, my one very general piece of advice that everyone should take into account is this: figure out if there are any "single points of failure" in your escape plans. That is, is there a single location where a fire could start that would block ALL your escape routes? In my case, the fire was on a first floor apartment across the hall from the elevator, between the two staircases, and also directly below my apartment's fire escape, so this single fire blocked all 4 of my easy escape routes. If you identify such a situation, think about what you will do if a fire does start there.
All that said, here are some things I could have done, which I came up with after the fact. Obviously I haven't tested any of these, so take them with a grain of salt:
Break into someone else's apartment and use their fire escape on another side of the building.
Find a way up to the roof and walk across to the other side of the building, which has its own separate hallway with 2 staircases and an elevator. Alternatively, I could have tried to break through my bedroom wall into the adjacent unit, which connects to the other side hallway.
If it came to it, I probably could have got my quilt soaking wet in the bathtub, draped it over top of my body for protection, held my breath, and sprinted down the stairs and out of the building. It turned out that while the smoke was going up both staircases, the fire was limited to only a single apartment unit, although of course I didn't know this at the time.
Outdoors, the fire was only blocking the staircase side of the fire escape. I could have descended down the other side of the fire escape by hanging down off the side and dropping down to the floor below me, one floor at a time, and then jumping down to the ground.
I have a long rope in my closet that I could have tied to my radiator and let out my bedroom window on the other side of the building. This would have been quite risky, because there's a lot of unknowns: How much weight can the radiator hold? How much can the rope hold? Am I strong enough to support my weight with my arms on a rope?
Lastly, it turns out you're unlikely to die from jumping out a 4th story window. (International note: 4th story is 3 floors up from the ground level floor) You're not terribly likely to walk away from it either, but a broken leg is better than dying in a fire.
After all, 2 isn’t a Schelling point. So why not four staircases?
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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…
Apartment doors, walls and floors can withstand many hours of continuous burn. The building would never be on fire, at worst you’d have one apartment or one floors public areas on fire before it’s put out. If my apartment was on fire, no alarms would sound in the building, only within my apartment, it doesn’t matter to my neighbours. There’s certainly scenarios in which you might need to evacuate, like a bomb threat,…