Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes | Hacker News Reader

Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes

practical.engineering

204 pointssohkamyung164 comments

Everything related to fires got better: more and better smoke and CO detectors, interior sprinklers, regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses, reduced smoking rates, increased awareness, faster response times, closure of firetrap rooming houses (fwiw: closing rooming houses contributes to the homelessness problem), better apartment inspections ...

We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

> They show up to random fender benders.

EVs can cause pretty bad fires from benign looking accidents. Perhaps this is for the best? Better safe than sorry as they say.

Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.

> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.

The problem is you need a good number when there is a serious fire, even if it doesn't happen very often.

In the UK, we have quite a few 'on call' firefighters (about a third of the total) who are fully trained and are paid but are not full time. They typically work another job but are available during certain hours if required. I'm not sure if similar systems exist elsewhere.

A huge portion of the US is covered by purely volunteer fire departments. Communities pay for equipment and training and that is it. Response times are slow but it is really the only viable option in rural areas.

At the federal level, FEMA and USDA offer extensive grants and low interest loans to fund fire districts in rural communities with a small tax base. I think basically every state offers similar funding assistance on top of that.

Not always slow. I had a kitchen fire at 4am from a microwave spontaneously combusting. Had the local deputy fire chief and local fire truck there within 15 minutes plus trucks from two other local towns.

Looks like 80% of firefighters (or rescue personnel according to modern naming) in Finland are members of volunteer fire brigades or so-called contract fire brigades and they respond to nearly half of the total emergencies but over 90% of emergencies outside densely populated areas.

In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.

So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.

> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.

When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.

The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.

Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.

With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.

> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.

(unless I Completely misunderstood)

And the problem with interior fire escape stairs was solved by encasing them in concrete and adding self-closing doors to prevent updrafts.

Which works great for new buildings. It not feasible to change a building that already exists.

External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago with existing buildings that were a fire trap and clearly better than nothing. However even then they knew they were not ideal.

From the article:

> One of the first technical considerations of the modern fire escape was carried out by the Franklin Institute in 1881 after the Randolph Street mill fire in Philadelphia trapped 35 people inside. Their conclusion was that external egress paths, in other words, the bolt-on fire escapes had, quote, “comparatively little value.” They recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations, but that internal stairways, properly constructed, afforded the best means of escape.

I took "The recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations" as a much less general statement than

> External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago

Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?

Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?

These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.

Yup, had this exact scenario across the street last week.

I realize it which is why their strategy is a good one. Does it make sense for the people who are able to do that job also all be able to put out fires?

I think someone that can carry grandma down the stairs and also occasionally put out a catastrophic fire is a pretty reasonable and efficient use of taxpayer money. The alternative would be what, having two different people to do those things?

It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.

It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.

Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).

The fire department should get a cheaper car for these calls then.

That isn't cost effective. They need the large trucks just in case - even though realistically they are never used. A large truck isn't that much more expensive to drive than a small one, and in any case if the large truck isn't used for more than a couple days you need to take it for a drive - ensure all the operators know how to drive it and if something broke (sitting is harmful to moving parts - wear is worse, but sitting is harmful) you want to find out and fix it right away.

Which is to say the small cheaper car only makes sense after you have enough large ones and conclude you still need more cars.

Where I live, the fire department has rescue trucks which sometimes can be large (like a ladder-less fire truck) but can also be as small as a heavy duty work truck. Some departments have enough money to have all kinds of various vehicles for special situations while other departments have just enough to own one vehicle to cover as many needs as possible. It would make more sense to buy something smaller but can they justify the cost to the county or city? And in cities, they still need the big ladder truck and likely need to host an ambulance in the station and probably a fire chief vehicle too. The money is limited as well as the space. I'm sure cities are already rethinking what they actually need now versus 50 years ago. I've already seen paramedic vehicles that are not ambulances, they look like a work van or truck, just enough for two paramedics and enough supplies to treat someone that doesn't need to immediately go to the hospital or to serve as an auxiliary during a mass casualty event. The truck is way cheaper than an ambulance.

>It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded

That's how it is in NYC[0] too...

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nyc-council-and-fdny-po...

I guess it depends on their activity level but driving the big trucks extra could also be training for newer guys learning to handle them.

Well, yes, the alternative would be the necessary number of people to do the first thing and the necessary number of people to do the second thing.

If the two needs are distributed such that it works well to have one group of full-time workers able to do both, then I reckon that’s fine.

yes. they are edge cases but the training that comes with it translates fairly well to other tasks.

carrying grandma out of a burning building and carrying her downstairs after a fall are the same skill sets

So is powerlifting and ...?

Powerlifting doesn't teach you the technique and spotting required to walk backwards down a staircase while holding a stretcher above your head so that grandma, who is in extreme pain, doesn't slide off and tumble to the bottom.

Neither does firefighting. The point is if we don't need as many firefighters to fight the fewer fires we have, there are more cost-effective ways of maintaining a group of first responders for medical emergencies.

You're just being adversarial for no reason.

Please, let's hear your ideas. (blows away in the wind)

You must be enthusiastic about people using ERs when they have strep throat, right?

Let me think for a few seconds about ideas. Fitter EMTs who can assist people in more demanding physical situations. A subset of firefighters who can provide medical assistance but don't need the complete fire training curriculum and so can be paid less. Maintaining the ratio of firefighters and stations which was previously found satisfactory but adjusting it for requiring fewer of them since we have fewer fires.

Your turn.

Maybe? Firefighting is extremely physically demanding, which is why you'll often see firehouses with built in gym, and rarely see a fat fire fighter. So that physical capability can be used in other circumstances.

Also, firefighters need to know how to dismantle a house quickly to support their operations. So if the door needs to come off the hinges to get grandma down the stairs, firefighters will be prepared for that and have it done in 30 seconds

Sure. And that's carrying someone out of a burning building. Most of the time the building you're getting someone out of isn't burning and you don't need someone trained to fight fires to do that and that person will cost less to employ.

Usually firefighters are on the clock and are paid the same whrehr they respond to a call or not

Don't forget all of those cats stuck in tree that get rescued by local FD. Recent stories of pets in storm drains being rescued as well. But as someone else already posted, most are responding to auto accidents. Nothing as useful for redirecting traffic and shielding first responders than a giant firetruck blocking the lanes.

Bold to say that in a forum of software developers, haha

Ouch :’(

I better go show up to metaphorical fender benders more

You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.

It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.

That is not how the US looks/works. The large chemical plant is in a large city (or suburb) where they can call plenty of other nearby cities for help.

Most of the land in the US doesn't have enough population to support a large chemical plant. The plant needs not only the people who work in the plant. It also needs schools, grocery stores, libraries, doctors... And that many people also really want things like sports teams. A small chemical plant can locate in a rural areas, but not a large one.

yeah sure, they're so bored they spend half their week cutting people out of their wrecked cars. Just to make you think their salary is justified

i'm telling ya clip the fire department, if a car wreck happens you can just have a doorfash guy come put cones around and light the accident on fire, itll clear up in a couple hours boom i just saved taxpayers trillions of dollars in waste

The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.

They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.

Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.

On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.

We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.

> Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.

Yeah. That makes sense a lot of the time. It also makes sense to reduce capacity when the need lessens while still maintaining adequate slack.

Except if you are hitting 100% utilization at any point, there isn't really any slack.

> Except if you are hitting 100% utilization at any point, there isn't really any slack.

Yes, that's why the phrase "when the need lessens" is important.

Besides that, it may be a reasonable decision that 95% utilization is acceptable in order to spend the additional money on something that provides more benefit.

Mass casualty events are rare, but you damned sure want a good response when one happens or the losses will be high. It's a never ending cycle that people seem to suffer from.

OMG so many people died, we need to spare no expense in insuring this doesn't happen again.

[time passes]

OMG these emergency services are so expensive, why do we even have them.

[budget cuts, size cuts, personnel cuts, cuts cuts cuts]

OMG, I'm on fire, everything is on fire, why did the state do this to me, we need to spare no expense in insuring this never happens again.

>> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?

If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.

Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.

I think that's being a bit too much here. I can't speak for Ontario fire departments, but in the US, major cities have specialized trucks with crews trained for things specific to auto accidents. Hazmat training to deal with leaking fuel/oil/fluids to stay safe and clean up.

Keeping firefighters from being bored is why you see them playing pickleball or other sporty things around the firehouse. If your firefighters are that bored, you should look at having the chief replaced with someone better trained. Especially for the city the size of Ontario.

Firefighters have interesting working rules. They are expected to work 8 hour days, but they are in the fire house for multi-day shifts.

Their work 8 hours which is a mix of physical fitness training (carefully designed to keep them in shape without being too wore out to respond if something does happen as they finish training) and training. They have a lot of time to learn about all the latest medical emergency treatments, the latest in fire fighting. They get constant CPR refreshers because even though they are often first on the scene when CPR is needed it still doesn't happen often enough to remember.

The other 16 hours - 8 of them are sleeping. the other 8 are theirs to do whatever. Any good firehouse will keep plenty of games (TV, board games, pickelball...) so that they are not bored.

we need approximately 0 of you, want much less though

Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.

They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.

We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.

>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."

Redundancy matters when it protects from plausible issues.

> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."

When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.

When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.

Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.

Hospitals have all critical equipment on battery backup. The non-critical but important stuff can turn off for a minute while the backup generator starts.

Power outages tend to correlate strongly with situations where the hospital is most needed - bad weather injures a lot of people and takes the power out

Almost all apartment fires start inside an apartment. Improved standards for fireproofing between units, automatic doors, sprinklers etc means fires stay contained long enough for people to get out.

>Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.

And yet, single-engine jets are prohibited from operating under Part 121 and must use Part 135 (the analogy here might be to an apartment building where the developer takes on the responsibility of structural code-compliance and safety, vs. a single-family home where the homeowner does).

There's a big difference in going from 4 to 2 engines, vs going from 2 to 1. And to be certified single engine jets must have battery backups, rapid depressurization tech, and a host of other things twin engines don't have to. In one case (Vision Jet) they use a whole-plane parachute to compensate for the lack of a backup powerplant

Safety advocates (I.e. fire experts) are on board with changing the Ontario building code to no longer require multiple stair wells in new structures below a certain number of floors because of the lowered risk factors. Just need policies to catch up.

Not if the central stairwell is designed as, effectively, a bunker in the middle of the building. Build it out of concrete, with door closures and ample sprinklers, and the stairwell will never be the source of a fire mandating total evacuation. Today we even have "areas of refuge", normally at landings, where mobility-impaired people may wait for rescue rather than attempt stairs.

Multiple exits is a great way to protect people in the event of fire, but it's not the only one.

In the US and Canada where the 2 stairway rule is in use there has been a huge unintended downside of dictating the form of all low-ish and medium rise apartments for decades.

When you need 2 stairs the natural, efficient form is a wide building with a long central corridor with stairs at both ends. Building something that wide generally requires assembling multiple parcels of land and a long, drawn out planning process and large amount of capital investment. Small apartment buildings on a single parcel can't ever pencil out due to the space required to be dedicated to stairs.

Combine in the additional code requirement for bedrooms to have windows (for both quality of life and safety egress) and you get the vast majority of apartments having a limited number of bedrooms with windows only on one side of the living space. 3 and 4 bedroom units that could economically efficiently amortize the high per sq ft cost of kitchens and bathrooms waste an enormous amount of space, so they simply don't get built. Anyone who wants to raise a slightly larger family, live with multiple generations, or split costs with multiple roommates has no apartment options, they are forced to look at high cost, low density urban sprawl.

We currently have prescriptive requirements that dictate things like multiple stairs. We need to switch to outcome driven requirements that require fire suppression and safety over a given period based on occupancy and building size to give firefighters a big safety margin to respond. Then develop those outcomes into tested wall structures with a combination of fire suppression and prevention techniques that developers can adopt. Multiple stairwells might be part of the fire plan for a building, but it also can include things like sprinklers, concrete stairways, and automatic fire doors.

Fires almost never start in ‘common areas’ like corridors and lobbies. Tenant spaces and apartments inside multi-tenant buildings have their own four hour fire barrier so if a fire starts inside of a tenant space or apartment, it’ll be four hours before it blocks the stairs at a minimum.

Eh, this isn't really true. An apartment fire on a windy day with the doors/windows open to allow drafts will burn through in less than an hour, and if it's extreme wind faster than that.

a couple of decades ago, I worked in the top floor of this old building in glasgow https://www.google.com/maps/@55.8601694,-4.2542338,15a,24.1y... . Ground floor of the building was a TGI fridays. The evac route was up onto the roof, across steel walkways to another corner of the building, and down a back stairwell.

There was a regular alarm test, so we knew where to go. Then one day there was a REAL alarm, we all trotted off in our designated directions, but as we came down that back stairwell, it was full of smoke (not thick, but clearly something going on...) then at the bottom we saw why: TGIF had been stacking cardboard waste in there, plus their employees had been taking cigarette breaks in there, beside the no smoking sign... and you'll never guess what happened. Yep, fire in the fire escape.

The fire marshall was getting very stabby pointy fingering at some sheepish looking people as we went by to our muster points.

(it was just a stack of cardboard and there was nothing else flammable in the stairwell, it wasn't life threatening, just reckless)

Why not 3 exits? It's a matter of balancing costs and benefits.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?

In USA, most are not paramedics (ALS). Those are typically only advanced-care ambulances (blood, drugs, intubation, EKG/manual defib, emergency operations like trach tubes). But a lot of firefighters are EMTs (BLS). Oxygen, vent bags, aspirin, Epipen, CPR, automated defib (AED).

Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.

I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.

I've had friends that have been fire fighters and I think the burnout is real. They're not dealing with structure fires much anymore which is what a lot of their training deals with. Rather they do a lot of social work in the area taking care of the unhoused, disinfranchised, mentally disabled, etc... all while having this unique training.

And this is also describing fire fighting in cities. In smaller town and more rural areas the workload is different. Not so much mental health, a lot more of the workload is accidents, but where it can really change is rural land fires in droughts. Get a dry windy summer and you can end up working for months at a time.

I very rarely see actual candles being lit anymore. It's almost always fake candles with led lights.

> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire

Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.

Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.

What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).

Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.

They are also often out there narcaning people when paramedics are not available (which I am sure they are not super pumped about).

Honestly I am not really upset about that. Train them to support the community in other ways while they hang out waiting for a fire. People are always raging that police cant handle mental health incidents, train them for that (heh I am sure firefighters would not be pumped about that but you get the idea).

I’m only upset that we have an over abundance of fire fighters now and are looking for ways to keep them busy. Retraining as a combination of EMT and Fire for instance.

I want an overabundance of firefighters. On average my town needs 0. However a couple times a year there is a fire and then we need 30 for a couple hours. We solve this by hiring 30 full time fire fighters so that 10 are always on duty, and when there is a fire we call the on duty fire fighters from the other nearby towns to help.

(The above numbers are only rough estimates, close enough for discussion, but not even close to right)

take a look at how their pensions work and and what it costs you and you might reconsider (basically, it's a similar deal to the police pension mafia)

Yeah the classic case is the firefigher who puts in 20 years, retires in his 40s with a full pension and then starts a second career or business.

And maybe that's fair compensation for someone who has been working a job that literally risks his life, but it's not cheap.

No! the only people that deserve to have enough money to be comfortable are people writing react frontends for surveillance tech

Oh no, a blue collar profession getting a lucrative wage! That's a right normally reserved for white collar turncoat vectoralists like surveillance industry software engineers. Quick, call all the other crabs in the bucket!

There are legitimate critiques of the perverse incentives of defined benefit pensions, but on the whole I'd say it's better to focus on why the overwhelming standard is for people to not be paid well.

(Police unions are indeed a scourge. But similarly, the amount they get paid is like one of the things I am least concerned about)

But the need for them has gone down? Should we hire 10x as many? 40x?

Has the need gone down? This isn't only about fire. Where I live fire fighters are a "jack of all emergency trades" because we can't keep experts in everything on hand all the time.

I'd rather paramedics for medical problems but they don't have training to deal with all the other things that happen in an emergency so we still need others. And better than paramedics is fast transport to a real emergency room because that will have specialized equipment that won't all fit on a vehicle - which a well trained fire fighter can do.

Interesting. In many (most?) US cities firefighters are responding a variety of calls, most commonly more serious car accidents. They also typically hold a number of certifications. Fire calls are uncommon. It makes the most sense from a utilization aspect IMO.

And even when a fire truck responds to a house fire (for example), they may still potentially need to treat and/or evacuate people who have been injured in the fire. Cross-training firefighters so that they can do both makes sense.

Yet people still die in apartment building fires, usually because they panic when there is a fire in another apartment, leave their apartment, and suffocate to the smoke. And then there are cases where the regulation has failed / not been followed, and the whole building burns down despite best efforts from firefighters.

I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.

Ha, in the US but I had an issue with my chimney where there a strong smoke smell in the basement and an inexplicable hot spot on the back of my fireplace (no fire had been lit recently, and what creosote there was wasn't ignited). Not knowing what else to do, I called the fire deparment's non-emergency line and explained the situation.

They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.

Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.

Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.

Probably just regular ol' overtime abuse.

It might seem like an overreaction when you only think about a possible fire. While their larger concern was probably the possibly imminent CO poisoning!

> now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise

If there isn't anything else going on, the opportunity cost of sending more people to your thing is very low and the risk that it wasn't actually a small issue can become much larger.

My aunt had a small kitchen fire. She called 911 and asked "Could you send a firefighter with an extinguisher, please?"

The 911 operator responded "Honey, we only send them one way."

And like a dozen guys showed up.

I hope this anecdote is intended to demonstrate the unreasonableness of the average person, rather than the unreasonableness of firefighters.

A fire that can be put out by an extinguisher doesn't stay a fire that can be put out by an extinguisher. The same for suspicious smoldering in a wall.

If you want to deal with a fire in a calm manner yourself, then deal with it yourself, right? When you call the fire department, you've declared that there is a situation bigger than you can handle. It's only reasonable for them to assume it's growing.

The only downside is a few extra truck rolls.

Yeah I hit the middle of the night microwave fire with two different extinguishers after the smoke detectors woke me up. No joy.

Did it need two additional fire trucks to assist my town? Don’t know. I’m not a professional in that field.

There was even an T apparently assigned to babysit me as I was underdressed when I left the house for mid-Jan.

This seems like the kinda event that could very well have been disastrous, where a real fire response was actually warranted. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991 was caused by embers from a fire that had been put out the previous day but reignited in hot weather. Killed 25 people, injured 150, and destroyed over 3000 homes. One of the homes destroyed was the creator of SimCity, and so it also spawned the Oakland fire disaster scenario in SimCity 2000, as well as serving as the inspiration for The Sims.

Will Wright impacted?

Yeah, his house was located a couple blocks away from where the fire started and burned to the ground. The Sims was inspired by the experience of rebuilding his life.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2011/10/17/will-wright-inspired...

Burning the house down in The Sims was one of my childhood guilty pleasures.

Were old buildings? I really cannot understand wooden construction.

In Oakland? Most of the homes in the region were built in the 1920s-1930s, though some were newer developments that were only about 10-30 years old.

Wooden construction is very common in America because wood is very common and hence cheap. In this particular region there's another reason for its use: it's right on top of a fault line, and wood-frame residential construction performs very well in an earthquake, while brick or unreinforced masonry tends to crumble.

A building only has two statuses, as far as firefighters are concerned:

- There is no uncontained combustion on the premises

- There is uncontained combustion on the premises

"small uncontained fire" can become "no fire" on its own, it can stay "small fire" for a matter of hours, or it can become "big fire" in under a minute.

They have no way of knowing: and your description, which I presume is perfectly accurate, can't help them decide. For example, during the one minute you took to make the call, the embers could have caught cellulose insulation on fire, traveling up the outside wall, and beginning to melt vinyl siding. By the time they arrived, the building might be approaching structurally unstable, endangering neighbor properties.

So yes. They show up prepared to tear down walls and cut firebreaks and such. Once a house is 'on fire' time must be assumed to be of the essence.

Not bored. They're looking to make their numbers to justify the next budgeting plan with the city.

Strong (and correct) indication of hidden fire--yeah, they're going to roll. And they are going to smash whatever they need to smash to get at the hidden fire.

Just because it didn't go big doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to.

Traditional fireplaces are VERY bad technology. Over 90% of the energy in the wood goes up the chimney and they ruin air quality in the house and they start so many fires. Even when not in use the chimney lets so much heated or cooled air out.

Bad technology for heating a house? Absolutely. Bad technology for emotional comfort? Certainly not. There's nothing quite like a fireplace.

They really aren't worth the hassle of cleaning the ash and getting the wood and cleaning the chimney. An outdoor fire pit is much better.

Not when it's below freezing and/or raining outside

I generally don't start a fire in the fireplace unless the temperature is below 10F. I'm not hanging out around the firepit at that temperature.

At the very least you should use a gas or wood insert

We used the firefighters busting it out as an excuse to put in a stove insert. Much more heat, just as good ambience.

Wow, you seem shockingly blasé about a fire inside the walls of your house!

Just because the fire didn't spread doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to, or either you or the firefighters knew if it did or not without the emergency response.

> regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses

Yes, regulation that increased the proliferation of known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in our households and pressed up against our spouses and children's skin and orifices.

Maybe I'll take the wrought iron fire escape.

Cheap li-ion e-scooters and bikes are here to turn all these advancements back.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

There are a few reasons for this, and none of them are that the firefighters are bored.

The first reason, probably more relevant in Ontario, is just a matter of practicality. If an injury is reported in an accident, the assumption is that a person needs medical attention. Emergency services can't really make an assessment of a scene without being on site, so both are sent in case there needs to be some kind of fire suppression or an extraction to reach the person. Simply, we don't want an ambulance to arrive at an accident, realize on-site that the jaws of life are needed before they can help, wait for another response time, and then render care. The potential to save a life takes precedence over raw efficiency.

(A quick side note about assessing a scene: if you're just driving by, it's basically impossible to tell how bad an injury might be in an accident. Modern cars are very safe, but if someone wasn't wearing their seatbelt and had their head in the wrong place when an airbag went off, even a fender bender can be a life-threatening situation.)

The second, at least in the US, is that ambulances are not considered essential emergency services in many communities[0]. This means that they don't get the same level of funding and are not subject to the same response time requirements as the fire department. Emergency medical services might be covered by a hodgepodge of private companies and volunteer efforts[1], so this also means that public services, such as the fire department, often have to fill in the gaps. Especially in rural areas, ample ambulance coverage just isn't profitable to the private companies that operate the service, so response times can be close to half an hour.

[0] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/06/26/no-amb...

[1] - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/08/the-problem-of-p...

I don't think they're sending firefighters as first responders because they're bored. The idea of a first responder is you send whoever is closest to get there and render aid. If it's a medical emergency, they may send firefighters or police, if they are closest, but they also send the EMTs/paramedics who may arrive a bit later.

Thirty years ago (in USA) that's already how it was done where I lived.

> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.

It is a common misconception that the job of firefighters is just to put out fires. They have long been a jack-of-all-trades profession. It has long been normal around the world for firefighters to also do rescue, inspections, hazmat operations, etc. 'Rescue' itself is a very broad and commonly needed function, which may be more common than actually putting out fire these days.

They are typically well trained in a huge number of things, for example you say hazmat.

Even if they can't handle it, they know who to call and how to report it. An EMS is going to be far less capable of identifying many kinds of chemically hazardous situations. Police officers are more of a mixed bag and typically do the "lets push people away from here to be safe so someone can identify the problem".

Is it? Here I read it's gotten much worse. Now you have 3 minutes to escape a fire while 40 years you had 17 minutes. (Other things have gotten better of course)

We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

I think this is much to broad.

Even the film does not suggest eliminating multiple exits; rather, it points out that it took a long time to replace external fire escapes with better alternatives. Specifically, internal, fireproof staircases that offer greater protection and are used regularly and therefore familiar to those fleeing.

When the redundancy is gone (not available, blocked, insufficient spaced) this can quickly lead to a disaster. Here are some recent examples

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Crans-Montana_bar_fire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_nightclub_fire

[3] https://gpe.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Johannesburg_building_fi...

One thing i noticed quite frequently lately: fires related to charging EV batteries. These fires are really nasty and hard to put out.

One hopes fireproof homes and idle firefighters are not the genesis for Ray Bradbury’s dark prophecy.

Here in France firefighters are first responders and fires are usually a small part of their workload. Last spring I was with a school group that visited a barrack of the Paris firefighter and one of the firefighter who was showing us around told us that firefighting is less than 5% of their responses. And we were shown their garage, where their two fire trucks were (one with a ladder, the other without), but their two other vehicles (two ambulances) were away.

Interesting article.

I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!

In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.

Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)

During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.

PE did a separate video on how the US and European fire codes differ on how many fire escapes stairwells a building needs. The US says two, which substantially limits the designs for buildings and the square footage efficiency of adding another floor. He argued that maybe all of the other safety procedures mean we should review that decision and allow for higher density by eliminating the redundant stairwell.

But I saw a retrospective documentary on the WTC collapse, in which the star witness named people who only survived the second tower because they found a way to cross to the intact fire escape after the second plane hit right into one of them.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I suspect perhaps if the building is too tall for a ladder truck to reach you, then the building should provide that redundancy instead.

In Japan, the main stairs of the building is designed like fire escapes. It is unenclosed and mostly on the side of the building. When I first saw them I thought it was silly to have the stairs open to the environment during rain and snow. I finally realized they have double purpose.

In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.

I live on the second story of a 3-story building. However, the 1st story is below ground. It's called "garden level", also known as "high risk of flooding". The "backyard" is a grassy embankment with warning signs to not walk there because it's dangerous. So obviously, all the tenants walk there all the time, and go in-and-out of their units by the back doors.

So my apartment has the front door, and front window. And I was attending a fire fighters' presentation about "close before you doze" where they advocate closing interior doors to stop the spread of fires. And this seems like a great idea. I quizzed the firefighter about my best recourse to emergency exit or refuge if the fire is blocking my front door exit. He said that it's probably best to simply jump from my 2nd-floor balcony.

Now he's obviously not wrong. I hope that I wouldn't injure myself jumping onto grass from that height. Obviously, we can agree that it's better than suffocating or burning to death in the hypothetical fire. I wonder if it would give me peace of mind to keep an emergency folding ladder around. I probably would consider it, if I were on the 3rd floor instead. That's quite a height from there.

I hope that anyone who may rely on emergency ladders does practice/drill with them occasionally. I would hate to have emergency equipment that malfunctions, or that I have no idea how to use it properly, because you don't want to find that out in the middle of a life-threatening emergency.

What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?

I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.

The most essential unspoken purchase for anyone living higher than the ground floor in an older building is an emergency escape ladder.

Is this really a phenomenon? Where and since when?

No one told me in either of my apartments.

In my 4th floor apartment in Tokyo there was a box containing what seemed to be basically an abseiling harness. Instructions in Japanese but seemed like if shit hits the fan you smash the window, clip it to the building and get yourself down to street level asap.

My parents had something very similar to this in their apartment in the midwestern US in the 80s. I recall it as being an aluminum mount with a chain ladder.

I remember those often being mentioned in “keep your home prepared in case of fire” educational materials, too. I’ve just never actually seen one.

Our AirBnB in Tokyo last year had a box mounted on the balcony which (according to the instructions on the outside) held some crane-like thing with a harness to let you swing out over the balcony and rappel down in the case of emergency.

Is that because a fire extinguisher is spoken or that it's not essential?

A fire extinguisher will not get you out. A fire extinguisher it to clear a path so you can get to the path outside. Many people get this wrong - they put the fire extinguisher by the door, but if you are at the door you should be going outside not trying to fight the fire. (most fires are small enough that you can put them out with a fire extinguisher so this seems to work - but that is not the primary purpose)

What you need is a path out when there is a large fire. Both exits and fire extinguishers are part of that. Everything else is a nice to have (sometimes very nice), but you still have to prepare for when everything else fails.

Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.

The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.

A old brick-wall building is basically a pretty shell protecting a wood frame.

Not usually for anything over a few stories. Most of those taller buildings are a combination of masonry and steel. Steel started being used in the 1880s/1890s.

Wood is a great construction material. It has better insulation value than brick, and the CO2 costs are vastly better.

>What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?

Me? I'd certainly prefer that didn't happen.

Which is why I'm glad I have a fire escape. Should there be a fire that either blocks access to the main stairwell and/or my front door, there's an additional egress point at the other end of my apartment.

I'd much prefer that there wasn't a fire at all, but I'd much rather have multiple egress points for me and my animals than having to sit and wait to die of smoke inhalation if a serious fire were to rip through my (more than a century old) apartment building.

Yes, the odds are good that some of your neighbors has a room so full of stuff that it will become dangerous to you in case of fire.

Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.

If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.

A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...

Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.

>This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly.

US apartments look ugly because the IBC has been picked over by every flavor of money grubbing business interests masquerading as concerned do gooders. Once you filter out all the options rendered financially noncompetitive by each of their bought and paid for rules there's only a few paths to a viable building. You might have a dozen megacorps buying windows from a dozen suppliers but those dozen times dozen theoretical options are the same thing in practice because that's what it takes to hit Leed Platinum (TM) or whatever.

Seriously. Go watch some 80s/90s movies that were set in the then present day. Those cube farms have more diversity of style and material than anything today.

A particularly dramatic example of this is Baltimore's Bromo tower https://www.bromoseltzertower.com/about/virtual-tour It was turned into some sort of artist studios, and as a minor architecture nerd i was having fun looking at the floor plans. The two staircases right next to each other confused me. Turns out it is that same requirement to have two independent stairwells and that was probably the least worst place to put them. Still stupid however.

Are the two elevators a code requirement as well?

See also: The Newby–McMahon Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_littlest_skyscraper Where they sort of want to use the upper floors. but it can barely fit one staircase, two would take up the entire floor, a building code quandary.

Every large building in the last 100 years has been built with multiple integral fire-safe paths of egress for the very reason that a path should be available if one is blocked. The design of buildings is very much conditioned on tables in the fire code about how many paths of egress, how large they must be, and how long they can be based on how many people need to be evacuated. (Not to mention how many hours of fire each door and partition must be designed to resist.) It's kind of a PITA. And it works very well.

External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.

In San Francisco, there's a bit of a push right now to re-allow single-stair design ("Single Stair Reform") for certain buildings (eg up to 4 or up to 6 stories). Requiring two stairways makes sense from a fire safety perspective, but it's made it incredibly difficult to cost-effectively build medium-size buildings on oddly-shaped lots.

It's tradeoffs all the way down!

I liked this HN post from 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35885982

I always confuse Practical Engineering with Stewart Hicks channel (both great channels btw.), because they cover similar things, for instance SH covered fire escapes 5 months ago here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP6NmlXldhk

> The story of their decline is a fascinating case study in how building codes actually work. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.

... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.

> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.

Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.

> Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around.

You're contrasting rules for new construction with rules for existing buildings during renovation.

It's difficult and often impractical to retrofit a protected stairway into an existing building, but it's not a major hardship to include in new construction (although requirements can substantially change layouts)

Requirements for multiple staircases and fire sprinklers.

If one can have an entire 20min piece about how bad fire escapes are and how bad they were from the start it kind of begs the question as to why they were allowed on new construction to begin with. Surely somebody was in favor of them?

Perhaps a comparison to the current breaker requirements in the electrical code and other "industry excess" shall we say, in the IBC is in order.

But Grady isn't gonna make that comparison because when a man's salary depends on not understanding something he won't understand it.

Building code is a very, very, very dirty sausage factory and dirty factories produce a lot more "oops we were doing it in a way we knew was wrong for 50yr" outcomes than the clean ones. It's a disservice to everybody to just hand wave that all away at a dozen points like is done here.

It's called Practical Engineering, not Abstract Debate Between People Who Think (Rightly or Wrongly) They Know Better Than the Experts.

I've got my own qualms about AFCIs, but I'm still going to install/use them in my own house. The only thing that could move that needle would be if they're actively harmful. Like I'm certainly not putting GFCI on the sump pump circuit.

You can't honestly write about the Kennedy family without at least touching upon machine politics and drunken shenanigans.

Likewise you can't honestly write an article about what's arguably a boondoggled peddled at great expense by fire code without at least touching upon the topic of financial iterest.

I'm putting GFCIs in everywhere before I put put AFCIs anywhere. Maybe that's just because I'm too poor for brushless everything though.

Regardless, I only mention them because they're a texbook example of a code inclusion that's "sus" in all the same ways fire escapes were then and obviously are now.

Your example of writing about the Kennedys would be focused on the social dynamics regardless.

Engineering is about the technicals, which includes safety codes, despite their contents having been created through the social processes of codification. It's an engineer's job to follow those codes, for better and for worse. On the whole I would say that is for the better, despite any corruption inherent to human processes.

I don't see how fire escapes were suspect in the context of buildings that were built around a single central open stairway. A second retrofitted external stairway is an obvious solution, using an exciting material of the time (steel).

I do suspect what we're missing from the article is a real sense of the time it took to make the transition away from this building design towards multiple distributed closed-door stairways with noncombustible finishes, including the elevators that make such designs palatable.

I could be wrong here, of course. But I'm not going to do a deep research dive to figure this out for myself, I'm content with the default answer of assuming the codes are mostly reasonable. Which is the same tack the author took. If you want to make a constructive point otherwise, you're going to have to do that work yourself.

> It's an engineer's job to follow those codes, for better and for worse. On the whole I would say that is for the better, despite any corruption inherent to human processes.

So we should all just bend over and take it quietly when the requirements are not just stupid but stupid for bad reasons? Everyone saying "welp, not my money, I get paid either way, gonna keep my mouth shut" is the problem.

>I do suspect what we're missing from the article is a real sense of the time it took to make the transition away from this building design towards multiple distributed closed-door stairways with noncombustible finishes, including the elevators that make such designs palatable.

About 50yr. So for ~50yr they were GTG for new construction

> So we should all just bend over and take it quietly when the requirements are not just stupid but stupid for bad reasons?

Your mistake seems to be assuming omniscience. You are the one asserting something is "stupid for bad reasons" as if it's universally applicable. While I may even agree with your assessment, I still recognize that I haven't put nearly as much effort into making that judgement as a standards body.

The extra cost of installing unnecessary fire escapes, or AFCI's, or whatever else might be mandated by code but not particularly effective, isn't anywhere near the top of my list of hills to die on. I'm perfectly content to defer to their judgement, even if it errs on the side of expensive rather than unsafe [0]. That's kind of the whole point of building codes - setting a minimum standard so most people can move on to focusing on other problems, rather than needing to spend their effort continually evaluating whether the roof over their head is going to fall down.

> About 50yr. So for ~50yr they were GTG for new construction

I can't quite tell the argument you're making. My point was that with mandatory fire escapes being a fixed quantity, the market had to transition to the different building designs on its own, in order for it to be demonstrated that fire escapes were not necessary. It would sure be great if in the middle of that 100 year span (IIUC), someone had a crystal ball that said fire escapes wouldn't be necessary going forward. Unfortunately we live in the real world where P != NP (by everything we've seen) and path dependence is a thing.

[0] my point with the GFCI on a sump pump is that it's erring on the side of significant property damage, versus a tiny shock risk while performing maintenance.

Can you share more about your complaints about these breaker requirements? I don't think I know enough about that issue.

Wait till you see what they do in Korean high rise hotels

*what ever happened

I hate that mistake with a passion.

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