> The victims gasped for air and had difficulties escaping, as there was only one escape route, with the emergency stairs and elevators being located outside the clinic.
> Experts were surprised by the fire's high death toll. The authorities are investigating how victims became trapped and the floor filled up with smoke so quickly.
> Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Yasushi Kaneko ordered the inspection of some 30,000 buildings in Japan that have three or more floors, but only a single stairwell.
A security camera in the building showed that Tanimoto tossed a bag, probably containing petrol, at the emergency exit. Tape is also believed to have been used to impede the use of the door. It is believed this was done so that clinic occupants would have a hard time evacuating. Investigators also found evidence of additional traps in the building.[21][22] The suspect was found to possess a knife, and blocked a person who tried to run back towards the elevator. The victims, with the path to the exits blocked by fire, went into inner windowless rooms in the back of the clinic where they died.[16]
When you have someone deliberately setting fires and blocking the escape routes with a knife, you have bigger problems than just one stairwell.
> 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 unthinkable? And how do you factor in emergency response personnel trying to go up the same stairs that are the only way out of people trapped in the building?
Yes, but as the article pointed out - building fires are no more deadly in countries that allow single staircase construction. I suspect that in reality it's simply an incredible rare occurance that not only you must evacuate(rather than stay put in your flat behind fireproof door), but also that the stairs are blocked, AND the fire brigade cannot clear them out AND the fire brigade cannot get you out any other way.
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.
Not just the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack, but the risk of other things that are likely to block a single exit (as fire sometimes does.)
Yes, but it looks like that sort of events (where additionally you have to evacuate rather than shelter inside your apartment) seem to be exceedingly rare, given that lack of a second stairwell has not been a problem at all in several Western countries.
So how many exits are needed for extremely rare circumstances? 5 stairwells plus two elevator shafts could take up >80% of floor space in a lot of high rise buildings...
The point is, since it was deliberate, the person could almost as easily blocked both stairs. It's not comparable to an accidental fire that potentially impress a single staircase
Part of modern US stairwell regulation also learned from 9/11, where they found out it wasn't a great idea to have all the required stairwells very close to each other either.
2 stairways are much harder to block than one, especially if they are at opposite ends of the structure. One person will struggle to keep them blocked.
Fire extinguishers are remarkably effective at opening locked doors, FYI. And a surprising number of people are not only aware of this fact, but remember where the fire extinguishers are.
Some folks would get stuck and not get out, but it generally requires dedicated eyes on a crowd if you want to keep them inside something for any length of time. Hence prison guards, locks being a dedicated profession, etc.
"Police quoted witnesses who saw a man walking into the clinic with a paper bag, which he put on the floor, right next to a heater by the reception desk, and kicked it. Liquid poured out, caught fire and the whole floor was in flames and smoke."
Don't really need to be an expert in starting fires.
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.
It’s surprisingly hard to put enough accelerant in a place to burn awhile (5-10 minutes?) in a way that can’t be interfered with and will keep going without tending, without drawing attention to yourself while doing so if anyone is paying attention. Most
portable methods (gasoline can?) are so volatile it is just going to explode almost
immediately and are easy to recognize as a hazard.
Certainly not impossible, but it requires more craftiness and more prep the more complicated we get.
Which hopefully there aren’t that many folks who are likely to do so. And if someone does, we can catch them fast.
Basic redundancy is a good idea (n=2) in general, for many many reasons. Maintenance doesn’t take out the only way out for instance, or a single fight or accident doesn’t leave someone stuck.
N=5 is probably overkill for anything for a huge convention center.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a person with a knife blocking the exit, or fallen debris. An exit can be blocked by anything, that’s why it’s important to have multiple escape routes.
Everyone in the comments is raising the (valid) fire safety argument; however, I'd like to point out that this is a non-obvious trade-off.
How many house fires are there? How many of them are in tall buildings? How many of them would block just one stair, and not two?
Yes, there is a probability that an extra stair will save your life; however, this is a very tiny probability, against a certainty of extra living space, for everyone, every day.
The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that
I hate the space argument because its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue - make the building 1 floor taller, or don't cram your residents just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.
My counter argument would be regulations for new buildings take a long time to be widely applied, I think you would need to judge every single fire on a case by case basis, not region or by period.
> just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.
You realize that this would mean the three residents would have to pay more for their unit, right? It isn’t just developers “milking” condo buyers or tenants. It has to do with efficiency.
People pay more for units all the time for various reasons - location, orientation, superstition, etc. I’m sure they’ll add “not suffocating to death during a fire” to the list.
Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you, though, and carry along a vast amount of stored energy. Buildings are designed to stand still and generally not be flammable. The expected value calculations are seemingly quite a bit different.
> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you
And buildings in North America are often framed out of the same material that they burn in their fireplaces.
Both present inherent dangers. Both have widespread safety regulations for this reason.
Vehicle accidents are the 2nd leading cause of accidental death in the US and fires are 6th. And this is the result of many decades of both being highly regulated.
> And I still find it surreal that people in world's richest country live in wooden houses.
A lot of those people live in seismically active areas. While modern masonry construction is certainly safer than traditional masonry, in general wood is far less dangerous than stone or brick in an earthquake.
Those aren't exactly the locations that come to mind when you think of "luxury housing". I mean, I don't think people are living in those houses by choice, do you?
Steel and concrete are ugly and cold. Wood is warm. Even brick and stone are more humane.
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 from happening or improve their outcomes.
> 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 decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.
> Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash
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.
Wood is one of the better materials if there is a fire. While it burns (a negative), it burns slow and gives plenty of warning before it fails. Most other building materials fail suddenly in a fire. Engineered wood has the same issues)
> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you
It's not the speed that kills you, it's the impact. Multifloor buildings are designed to help you live and work at a height that can kill you, and to prevent air entering and escaping which can kill you.
If you can assume that the risk of fire or collapse isn't worth mitigating against, why not assume that a car will never hit anything?
The risk of fire and collapse is mitigated to a large degree already. People are arguing about the relative utility of further mitigations. At least in the US, folk mostly build interior walls with sheetrock and their exterior walls with cement based composites. Bedrooms are legally required to have smoke detectors. Electrical and gas runs are supposed to be installed "to code". Tall buildings require engineering to make appropriately strong structures. Buildings don't completely burn down or collapse very often, especially compared to the frequency of serious car crashes.
He could pay a bit extra to reduce his commute from 30 minutes to 29 minutes. That would already be a reduction of death risk higher than the second staircase in the building.
It does not guarantee that you won't encounter a deadly fire. It just adds one extra escape route for this extremely rare event. You could also add an escape slide for each apartment.
The amount of available space isn't the only benefit of using only one staircase. It also means the units can face outward in multiple directions and there's a more central common area.
Municipalities in USA are adopting code for residential new construction to require sprinklers. Big cost that most people won't do anything to stop it because it is only for really big houses (for now).
In fifteen years people will wonder why new housing is so expensive and every size house has sprinklers which the homeowner must hire someone to maintain. And pay for sprinkler inspection report prior to resale.
On a totally different note, I can't find any cheap or affordable new cars. Am looking for basic wheels without finicky gadgets like backup cameras and tire pressure monitors and lane departure warnings. Something simple and without high insurance costs to cover all those gadgets I don't need.
I wonder why things (house, car) seem unaffordable and contain gadgets which are difficult to fix and which increase insurance costs. What happened America?
Well for one, they have been required equipment for years - tire pressure sensors and backup cameras in general. So you’d need to go quite far back.
And the still working quite far back vehicles are pretty valuable because they have stood the test of time and don’t have all the buzzword crap, so folks don’t want to part with them.
The old cheap ones also got fed into a grinder (essentially) for cash for clunkers.
I would install fire sprinklers in my house, but there isn't a simple form based code. When I install outlets there are a few rules (were to install them, how many on a circuit, and many other details easy to look up in a wiring for dummies book), plumbing has similar rules. For fire sprinklers I need to go back go engineering and calculate all the details, not only is that a lot of work, I'm not certified to do them so the inspector won't pass my work unless I hire one of the few (and thus expensive ) engineers who are qualified.
If fire advocates really cared they would figure out the rules to follow and that would make it much cheaper for everyone.
My house had sprinklers and it was not a big deal. There was one special valve they said you should change every five years. But that’s the only maintenance anyone ever told me. No one had to check them before the sale.
For what it’s worth, I used to think the same as you regarding cars, but since many of those features are required now you can’t find a new car without them. So I had to get them, and turns out, they’re pretty useful.
> The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that
Why wouldn't you be able to compare statistics from the US to any other country that doesn't have that rule?
There are alot of factors: building codes, materials, age, likely ignition sources . Probably not impossible, but difficult to find a meaningful way to compare.
I'm also guessing that fire reporting doesn't include the level of detail you would need. For example, a fire in which firefighters were able to tackle from two sides would be quickly extinguished, where as the same fire with 1-sided access might have become a disaster. But thats a what-if, only learned the hard way.
"its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue"
You need to go back and read the article more closely. It's a HUGE quality of life issue; mainly US building codes restrict apartments to one side of the building which has all kinds of implications - cross airflow, alignment of rooms with the sun - and the ability to have more variety of sizes of units to better meet needs that currently go unmet, especially with families.
I mean if you look at the article the majority of it is all about quality of life - not only for the apartments, but greater/more effective use of the stairwells and common areas.
Given the popularity of wood construction (5-1s are most of what gets build afaict), I think the main limiter is how big you're allowed to build wood buildings.
You are free to ignore fire safety rules in your own private house, built far away from everyone else's private homes (and anything flammable). History shows that fire can be disasterous.
> That's the weirdest euphemism for murder I've ever seen.
I don't believe he killed his son, and I believe the wording in the articles is intended to indicate that he tried to force his son to kill himself and ended up stabbing him in the head.
Good point. But to be fair, you should consider the injuries and deaths caused by elderly falling off stairs - 1M injuries, 12,000 deaths in the US alone. [0]
Compared that with 3,700 deaths and 16,600 injuries for ALL fires, not just fires in buildings [1].
My view would be that stairs KILL, and that new buildings should avoid stairs (at least, within a single unit) at all costs. We should also rethink how we design stairs and stair safety, and adjust building codes accordingly. Of course, this will most likely never happen.
It would be far-fetched to think that having a second staircase for egress would result in additional deaths. More staircases does not cause more traversals of staircases.
Stairs can be made a lot safer for elderly people. One way is to put in landings every 3-4 stairs and change the direction 90 degrees each time. This way if you fall it’s not very far. You can also have very firm, easy to grasp handrails and thick padded carpet on the stairs and landings to soften them. Finally, for very frail elderly people you can install a chair lift so they can ride up and down instead of climbing the stairs.
Turning stairs into ramps doesn't change anything about this. The point isn't the stairs, it's the exits. We just haven't figured out how to have entrances and exits in multi-story buildings that don't involve stairs or elevators. I don't think chutes and ladders would be safer for the elderly.
But also in Japan they allow for rescue/escape through special windows which can be broken in an emergency (the ubiquitous red triangles you see on all tall buildings), so in effect there are many escape routes.
Yeah--what matters is two means of egress. It doesn't matter what form they take. We live in a two-story house, the stairs are the only normal means of escape. But the building code requires bedrooms to have windows sufficient for a firefighter in full gear to go through and there's an emergency ladder stored next to the most accessible window in the one upstairs room actually used for sleeping.
As the article states, there are lots of Western countries (including mine) that do not require a second stairwell for midrise apartment buildings. It's not a theoretical question. In a properly compartmentalized apartment building, you should not exit your apartment unless it's the one that's on fire.
Well I am never convinced by an argument of "well others do it", that is never a valid justification IMO. The US has always done things different than the EU, and IMO that is a good thing.
As to fire, that is but one of many other safety concerns, I personally will never live in a place that only has 1 escape vector, even if fire concerns were mitigated
Not perusing available evidence when making policy decisions like this is simply bad decisionmaking. “Doing things our way” just out of principle is just as silly as blindly aping others. It’s possible to (fallaciously) argue against anything by saying “but we’re special so doesn’t apply to us” and I’ve seen too many bad decisions made due to what is essentially a case of the NIH syndrome.
In practice, usually fire escapes are more harm than help. A fair amount of disasters happened where in the event of an actual fire, the fire escape had been poorly maintained and became overloaded so that they fell to the ground during the evacuation.
When the hallway is on fire and the only option is the stairs behind you, I really doubt you'll care about the space 'wasted' on them.
And in response to Grenfell, the argument is tenants don't like fire drills; just wow. Eventually everyone forgets the reason for regulations...is there a named law for this phenomenon?
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 strategy.
Is “stay in your flat while the building burns down around you” a common fire safety plan in the UK? Because that seems scary as hell. And also negligent.
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, but we are speaking about internal fire, in which case there’s more danger in hundreds of people fleeing in panic down stairs (whether that’s 1 stair case or 2) than staying inside.
> Apartment doors, walls and floors can withstand many hours of continuous burn.
24 stories of Grenfell were engulfed in an hour - the fire bypassed the doors, walls and floors, by going up the outside.
> The building would never be on fire
The entire building was on fire. 72 people died.
> The problem with Grenfell was that building regulations had been violated, at which point, all bets about safety are off.
Mistakes get made. Hence redundancy, like two staircases. If you're going to design for 'no mistakes ever made' then don't bother with any fire systems as a fire is a mistake in the first place.
It's so not criminal that plenty of hi-rises in the UK still have flammable cladding. If it were criminal, the people who put it on there would be in prison.
The correct approach is to design for the biggest common mistakes, not for all mistakes ever. We already do this for floods, earthquakes, wind load, etc.
Trying. Because the UK government absolutely does not give even a single fuck. Housing is a shitshow everywhere. (A symptom of completely bonkers politics in general.)
> there’s more danger in hundreds of people fleeing in panic down stairs (whether that’s 1 stair case or 2) than staying inside.
Is there? I’ve never seen people panic when a fire alarm goes off. Maybe if the fire alarm is going off as the building is filling with deadly smoke people would panic. But then that seems appropriate (or at least better than sitting and waiting to die of smoke inhalation).
Pretty sure the Grenfell situation would have ended better by having everyone evacuate. And yes, the incompetent cladding work makes that a special case. But a huge amount of our codes are for a special case. Every so often it saves 70 lives.
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.
> If the concrete and fire doors are doing their supposed job, then the fire brigade can just wait.
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)
I’m struggling to understand the scenario you’re describing. So the alarm goes off because an apartment is on fire. In response to this, everyone else waits until the fire brigade shows up to attempt to exit? I’m pretty sure if people are going to evacuate, they’ll do this in response to the alarm, and not wait and block the stairs. Also I’m pretty sure the fire brigade can tell them to get the out of the way to get up the stairs if necessary. How narrow are these stairs anyway? And why did everyone not evacuate before the fire brigade showed up?
I just find the “apartment on fire, but everyone is blocking the stairs so the fire brigade can’t get to the burning apartment” scenario to be far fetched. Are there documented cases of this? Because there is at least one documented case of people sheltering in place and the building burning around them.
I never feared fire when living in a high rise, and never had to evacuate except for drills. But here’s a recent counter example where shelter-in-place can go wrong. https://www.thestar.com/news/2021/toronto-fire.html
It does seem to be the norm for the UK: “In the United Kingdom... residential buildings are designed with a stay-in-place firefighting strategy as opposed to simultaneous evacuation, and regardless of building height, maximum occupancies determine staircase width, resulting in many tall buildings serviced by a single stair core. On June 14, 2017, one such building, the Grenfell tower, was engulfed by the deadliest residential fire in the United Kingdom since the Second World War and cost the lives of 72 people. Subsequent inquiry determined that the negligent use of combustible cladding and insulation caused the rapid spread of the fire up the building exterior. The tower consisted of a 24-storey concrete structure with a single central exit stair, for which the shelter-in-place evacuation policy was sustained for more than 80 minutes before a general evacuation was ordered.”
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?
The South Tower had one remaining stairwell survive impact and 18 people were actually able to evacuate from above the impact zone, which is actually pretty impressive when you consider that the impact was on floors 77-85, and the people who called emergency services were told to stay in place. One of the survivors was actually only 20 feet (6 m) from the left wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Praimnath
That being said, a lot of fire codes and related legislation had to be updated in the wake of 9/11. Among the many other dumb things:
* the stairwells were all extremely close to each other. In the North Tower they were 70 ft (21 m) apart and in the South Tower they were 200 ft (60 m) apart, which is probably why one stairwell survived in the South Tower and none did in the North.
* stairwells were only surrounded by drywall instead of concrete, which is another contributing factor to why so many of them were rendered inoperable. If you're not familiar with drywall, you can literally punch a hole through it with your arm.
* stairwells were built with a 44 inch width because it was assumed that the average person had a shoulder to shoulder width of 22 inches (55 cm). This slowed down evacuation a lot.
* the fire code was incorrect. the building was only half full but took much longer to partially empty than a full evacuation of the full occupancy tower was projected to take. so codes were revised.
* there were not enough stairwells according to code. but how might this be? well, the owner and constructor, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is a federally created entity, and so is not actually subject to local fire codes. (This last point wasn't actually addressed; they're still not actually required to follow NYC fire codes, but they did at least do so for the new iteration of the towers.)
* In a previous attack on the WTC, people were evacuated from the roof, but since that incident the roof doors were locked to prevent base jumpers from gaining access.
These things correlate though. Sure, sometimes we get misses like child car seats, but more often than not outrage-induced regulation manages to make things better.
Most residential detached multi story houses only have one staircase. If government forced me to give up one bedroom and build an extra staircase, so that I have a slightly higher chance of survival of a very unlikely event, I’d be fucking pissed.
I don't think we are talking about modifing existing buildings or small homes, they are talking towers and large units - a lot of places still count jumping out a residential second floor as an exit, so you'd probably be fine.
Being on the 7th story is very different from being on the 2nd story. If the staircase was to catch fire right now it'd be like a 6 meter jump down the window, maybe less if I manage to lower myself by hanging off the edge. I can land on my legs and I'd risk breaking an ankle or something like that at worst, not ideal but I wouldn't burn to death.
> think of all the wasted space and weight having 8 exit doors on a airplane
If we could choose to fly on the same plane with 4 doors that would give us more legroom and get us to our destination in less time, I believe a lot of us would make that choice.
Eh? More legroom? Leg room is determined by the airline, not the plane.
If there were fewer doors there would me more seats, and the weight of the seat, passenger, and luggage would far outweigh the weight saving on the door.
No, the limit of airplane speed is the speed of sound, as you get very close to that aerodynamics changes greatly. While you can make a plane go faster it is rarely done.
A giant heavy emergency ballistic reserve parachute system (currently used on smaller planes) is a much better analogy than 8 doors, which don't change the equation that much. Let's waste 20% more fuel to be able to recover from the rare all engine failure.
yeah. it is. but only in the same way that the prohibition of tetraethyl lead merely subsidized a slightly smaller amount of brain damage for relatively few children at the significant cost of the cheapest anti-knock agent known to mankind
seriously, who is pushing this weird anti-fire-code agenda and why is it in slate
The journalist was lazy. The only 'statistics' offered is a graphic from the lobby against 2nd exits...that website's home page says:
"This website is a tool to make sense of the wicked problem of the second egress in Canada and prepare a building code change."
It is super biased, and the bigger issue is that it is impossible record what-if situations like how many minor US fires could have been major tragedies if they had a single stair instead of two, and firefighters could tackle a fire from two sides.
Just looking at one of their sources even states that rapid smoke/fire in stairways and vertical opens is a significant portion blocked-escape deaths
Trapped-by is not the same as "would have been saved by a second egress", if the fire traps you in your room for example. It has all structure fires.
This whole fire (and building) safety code problem is that it's driven by superstition instead of data. It mandates certain solutions instead of outcomes. (Eg. the railing spacings to prevent kids from being able to fall through.)
Many developed countries have similar outcomes without the same strictness of code, plus housing is so overregulated in so many ways it's no wonder that many people argue for shifting the set-point in these trade-offs in order to help more people to have housing.
Of course ideally society would address poverty so there trade-off between safety and other aspects would be just academic.
For people commenting that it is worth to sacrifice living space for a little bit of security: do you live in the suburbs (in order to have more space) or do you live in a smaller apartment in the city (in order to have a shorter commute)?
The risk you avoid by reducing driving is much, much higher than the risk you avoid by having a second staircase in your building. People choose money/comfort over security all the time, but then act like making that choice is absurd and only a monster would do it.
Is it really? Based on micromort stats in the U.S., walking and biking places is way way more deadly than driving a car per km. unless you drive everywhere while living downtown (which sounds unlikely), there is gonna be some sweet spot where you need to drive but don't live too far from where you need to go.
right, but my point is that driving 16kms to work is not any more dangerous than biking 1km to work. Based on the states, driving 160kms per day is not more deadly than biking 10kms, so living 80kms from work and driving is the same level of danger as living 5kms form work and biking. and that only accounting for deaths, I have to imagine getting in a non-deadly bike accident is more damaging than a non-deadly car accident, although I don't have data to support or deny that theory.
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. My building specifically asks residents to shelter in place.
If a fire in my neighbours apartment meant I needed to escape, certainly an extra egress point would be nice, but the solution to that problem seems to be… better fire isolation.
[1] The grenfell disaster (mentioned by the article) was so deadly because people sheltered in place as instructed… but that building had been modified without following regulations.
In the USA, the Sept 11 WTC collapse was another one of those "Shelter in place as deadly" incidents when "something that couldn't happen" (skyscrapers collapsing from impact/fire/{conspiracy theories go here}) did. They were "designed to withstand an airplane crash" - and, previously, other buildings had [0].
"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.
I understand the point you're making but it doesn't consider that fire safety is made up of layers, including (but not limited to) construction, equipment, policy and response. "Ah shit my building is on fire, I better run" makes so many assumptions that it cannot be considered a meaningful fire safety strategy. For example, what if I am asleep? what if I am deaf? what if I cannot walk?
Certainly, there's disasters where multiple catastrophic failures result in horrific outcomes, but if we design policy around "absolute safety is impossible, so run" then we'll be less safe and more anxious. The safest buildings are big well-managed apartment buildings with shelter in place policies, because robust strategies that have been implemented from the ground-up are always going to beat half-baked strategies implemented based on an approximate understanding of single family home building regulations.
As glib as it is to acknowledge, apartment buildings are so safe because safety is built on the back of loss. I am benefiting from the lessons learned from every disaster that has come before.
Response was the first thing that came to mind reading your initial post. I bet you have a full-time fire service close by your building. 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. I can think of several multistory apartment buildings that I know are in volunteer fire department districts off the top of my head. And it’s not like I memorize fire districts.
Volunteer firefighters live in rural areas and mostly serve farm and shall towns. Every suburb I've lived in has full time firefighters. Most people live in cities and suburbs not rural areas.
There are about as many people in rural areas with volunteer fire departments as there are people in non-rural areas with volunteer fire departments.
17% of the US lives in a rural area. 32% of the US population is covered by a volunteer fire department. There are plenty of suburbs with VFDs, often lower-income.
Because volunteers spend so much less of their time actually fighting fire. 70% of firefighters being volunteers doesn't mean anything like 70% of firefighting is done by volunteers.
And don't expect the volunteers to accomplish much--when the alarm goes off they have to go to the firehouse first, and thus will have a bad response time compared to a professional fire service. They're far more about keeping the fire from spreading than actually putting it out.
Similarly, the standard instruction for earthquakes is "stop drop and hold", since the advice has to be fully general, covering all people in all circumstances, including highrises where evacuation is not possible. But I live in the ground floor of a not particularly well-built four story apartment building; my desk is eight feet away from an outside door. If there's an earthquake, I'm leaving!
I’ve lived and worked in very earthquake prone cities (Wellington, NZ). One of the reasons given to stay inside is that in certain areas of the city, shattered glass falling from sky scrapers would fill the street up to a meter deep along Lambton Quay.
That may not be the best idea. Certainly, if the earthquake is strong enough to put you in danger on the ground floor, objects can and likely will fall down from those four stories while you’re exiting the building.
The first time an earthquake woke me up, I was out of bed, down 14 flights, and out in the street within a couple of minutes. The stairs were open-air so maybe the building didn't qualify as "high-rise". I don't think I erred, although maybe my neighbors who took a half hour to reach the street did? I guess they were looking for shoes... ISTM "the standard instruction" would be useful in a very narrow set of circumstances. Obviously it would be useless if the building completely collapses killing everyone, whether immediately or after half an hour. It wouldn't be any better than any other procedure if the building remains intact. The only circumstance in which it would save lives would be when the building immediately collapses enough to kill people in stairwells but not in apartments, and safety crews can be counted on to extract people from the wreckage. That seems pretty minor compared to the obvious advantages of immediate evacuation.
I’d probably choose unfenced home swimming pools, driving laws, pollution and guns to fix before building fire codes, if we’re looking at “things that seem to be insanity”.
When the topic is "Why doesn't the US do stairwells like other countries?" and the answer is almost entirely "Fire codes prohibit it for the following list of mass-casualty fire deaths due to stairwell behaviors in fire," the rest of those things seem rather off topic.
Eh, the topic is broad. The real question is: where does it make sense for society to put resources to prevent premature death?
One option is staircases (aimed at reducing mass casualty events in fires). There are other options to improve fire safety. There are other options to improve safety in other circumstances.
Perhaps with the costs of second staircases, there are things we could do to buildings for less money that would save more lives from fire. Should we do both? Just the cheaper one? Neither?
How do we decide which ones are justified for their cost, and which ones aren't? Who should bear these costs? What things should be grandfathered and have a slow transition towards higher safety? What things should be immediately improved?
The answer to the staircase question comes down to how we answer questions like this. And the fact that we may be tolerating much bigger risks is definitely an interesting point.
The reason "shelter in place" is recommended is that it's the smoke that kills. People naturally fear flames but you're more likely to pass out from toxic smoke and never wake up, without ever seeing actual flame. Several stairwells don't help unless they're completely isolated from each other, which is totally unfeasible.
Is better fire isolation obviously cheaper than a second staircase? Depending on the footprint of the building, it actually sounds a lot more expensive.
That's exactly why you're not supposed to go to the stairwell. That's where the deathly smoke is. Apartment doors are spec'd to keep fire and smoke out. Plus apartment windows must be openable. Ventilation systems are designed not to circulate air between apartments.
Seems like smart design, though two stairwells still seems useful too? But if the strategy is huddle in place and smoke-sealed doors, maybe not.
But I have A question from your PoV as a resident if London w/ more "on the ground knowledge" outside of normal media reports: What happened with Grenfell tower to go so wrong?
> Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
> 1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
> 2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
> This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
I rather suspect that having independent two exits from the building does make us safer during a fire, and that this article simply represent lazy unprofessional journalism. The thorough lack of outsider opinions (from anybody other than the author and the subject of the article) strongly reinforces this initial impression.
I use that phrase when attempting to shed some light on a topic - but I use it in the strictest sense, to assert that there is no evidence to support whatever hypothesis is being presented by the prior argument.
Burden of proof is a key idea I think - though sometimes it can be hard to ascertain where that should lie.
Unless you're speaking to a specialized audience, probably better not to. Language is about being understood, not being right. If you use a phrase that is commonly used incorrectly, and you use it correctly, and your audience misunderstands you - you are communicating badly. Better to simply use phrases that aren't as commonly used incorrectly.
The Slate article doesn't directly state this but does mention that many of the safety rules have been in place for decades - some since the 1940s. Presumably - construction materials + fire fighting methods have improved dramatically in that time so buildings are much safer now.
I dont think its unreasonable to want very safe buildings but clear that by the rules staying the same means they are using a different risk calculation then when they were created.
> Presumably - construction materials + fire fighting methods have improved dramatically in that time so buildings are much safer now.
I wouldn't be so sure. Fire prevention methods have improved, but instead of booking the safety gains, this has been seen as a reason to allow wooden structures that previously would not have been legal to build (the famous 5-over-1).
FWIW fire deaths have gone down by half since the 70s. Perhaps you could attribute this to fire alarms or better automatic sprinklers but overall this is a very good trend given population trends.
I'm also fairly certain that better fire retardant materials are used now and that's why wooden structures are allowed.
I read a lot about these in local news because I used to live in a town in Massachusetts where one of those buildings burned down in construction. According to what I read, it's mostly the sprinklers that make it safe (or at least viewed that way) -- before those go in they're a big tinder box. This trend really took off with building code changes in 2009 though, so 1970 might not be the right starting point.
I guess my larger point is if risk of death by fire gets cut in half because of variables other than extra staircases - then the benefit of adding extra staircases gets cut in half while the cost remains the same (or even increases).
Assuming that they are independent factors. In many instances, a life may be saved by the interaction of two variables. Signaling and egress often contribute in complementary functions.
i wouldn't really expect that to be the case. we've got a lot more plastic furnishing/building materials now and perhaps there's tradeoffs but it's still basically just condensed oil. think of your couch as candyfloss gasoline.
most residential structures are wood frame, even apartment buildings are often just a few wooden-frame stories on top of a single-story concrete podium.
internal firewalls are probably the most significant improvement. you still don't want to be trapped on the wrong side of one with no way down.
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 fire and I didn't know what to do.)
Every building is different, so my advice might not be useful for you. I'd recommend researching your building and figuring out several escape strategies, including the details like how you will protect yourself from the smoke (smoke will be EVERYWHERE, and you really don't want to breathe it in). If a fire is something you're worried about, I'd recommend writing/printing out your escape plan and posting it somewhere, e.g. in your closet, because there's a good chance you will be too scared to remember it when the time comes.
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.
There is one exit on the first floor, between the two staircases. The apartment on fire was the closest one to this common exit, directly between the two staircases and across the hall from the elevator, so the smoke went up both staircases equally.
At least here in Germany that's the default. Fire and smoke will absolutely not spread between (fire-)units. Staying put is absolutely fine, obviously if you can get out that's encouraged but with a single set of stairs staying put isn't a death sentence at all.
If the building is properly compartmentalized, you're supposed to stay in your apartment in case of a fire (unless yours is the one that's on fire, obviously!)
This is a pre-war building, so I have no idea what the fire code was like when it was built. That said, this fire was indeed contained to only the apartment where it started and I think one or two adjacent apartments.
The first person I ever saw laid out on the ground during a fire had been sleeping in an apartment building which had only one exit, at one end of the building. The fire-escape stairs on the other end was missing, and the door bolted so it would not open.
The fire was raging near the only stairway. It was the only access firemen had. The young kid was dead.
"Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason" is a complete idiot.
In the article, the architect spoke about how the goal of single stair buildings is to kill that hallway - one stairwell with the doors to each apartment on the stair itself, then narrower lots; similar to how it’s done in Europe.
He points out that the long corridor type of building you are describing is often caused by the need to make a Teo staircase build financially viable.
Ah. An anecdote and an ad hominem. The perfectly balanced reasoning cocktail known to mankind. The best way to make policy universally.
Anyhow, funny story regarding dead people after a fire. He jumped out of a balcony. The fire was in his apartment. The firefighters were already at the door. It turns out the dude was off his meds. (Or never on them.) Because no one gives a shit about mental health. But maybe let's mandate bars on balconies so people can't jump out.
That's not an ad hominem. Calling someone an idiot because of what they say and do is not an ad hominem, it's literally the only reason to call someone an idiot. Calling what somebody said wrong because they are an idiot is an ad hominem.
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.
This was 2007 and I did it out of necessity because we couldn’t find a floorplan we liked.
I did most of my thinking on paper and used sketchup to visualize, check measurements, etc. We were dead-set with sticking to a budget and I think it really allowed us to maximize the utility per square foot.
No. It probably isn’t that interesting. I lived in a two story home previously and i just felt kind of vulnerable having only one way down to the ground floor.
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.
If hallways are designated awful, then that middle design definitely shouldn't end with all that dead space. And why is the hallway wider than the right design?
And if it's acceptable to combine staircase and hallway, as long as there's another staircase available, you can do even better: https://i.imgur.com/Wa7p4sy.png
The second might be too risky, but I don't think the first one adds any risk.
This page makes a claim and has links to sources at the bottom:
“International Fire Death Rate statistics show no correlation between the allowable building height for residential buildings with a single egress stair and fatality rates. The U.S. NFPA attributes the worldwide trend in decreased fatality rates between 1979 and 2007 to improved in firefighting capacities, stringent regulation of combustible materials in construction and increased requirements for modern fire safety measures like sprinklering and automatic fire alarm systems.”
Anecdotal, but I've never heard of an apartment building fire where people get trampled trying to escape. This in Europe where many if not most countries do not mandate a second escape route for midrise buildings. It's simply not a problem. You're supposed to shelter in your apartment anyway, which almost always is much safer than the hallway in case of a fire.
Yes, but that is about large crowded events specifically, where the crowds can be tens to hundreds of times larger than the number of residents in a midrise, and remaining in a specifically constructed fire-and-smoke-resistant shelter (one’s home) is not an alternative.
Ideally these apartments could be rented to the many many many people that prefer to not have a car of their own. Especially in SF, there's a need for more apartments like that.
To solve the parking problem, SF should require a dedicated parking spot be obtained before allowing a person to register a car with a San Francisco address. Alternatively, start charging reasonable rates for street parking, and have hugely increased rates for permits beyond a person's first.
"Free" parking has an extremely high cost on every aspect of city life.
> Ideally these apartments could be rented to the many many many people that prefer to not have a car of their own. Especially in SF, there's a need for more apartments like that.
The significant price differential for SF real estate without parking suggests this is about 3 "many" too manys.
The price differential reflects the high cost of devoting space to parking, not of the demand for it.
A parking space require not only the square footage for the car, but also the lane to get to the parking space. A constructed parking space is equivalent to 1-2 bedrooms worth of living space, which is a huge difference in real estate prices.
It sounds like you haven't ever actually been in a garage. The lane to the spaces is shared by all the spaces, and the garage also houses electrical distribution, water supply, heating and cooling which couldn't be co-located with a unit anyway. It would be at best storage space, and at worst it would just go to waste.
The amount of lane space scales linearly with the number of parking spaces. You can't add more parking spaces without adding additional lane length to reach those parking spaces.
Take a look at any aerial view of a parking lot and you'll see that only roughly half of the are is dedicated to parking spaces.
I don't think anyone's weighing the two options against each other? The space used by a first-floor garage can't be used by stairs instead, unless it was like one really big set of stairs just to the second floor.
If you want a deep deep dive into how parking has shaped our cities - I would recommend reading about the “high cost of free parking” and “parking minimums”.
Right but the cities are already there. We don't have the luxury of redefining the American lifestyle and dependence on cars with a single unit of new housing. There's no benefit for the developer - leaving out parking (aside from the mandate to include it) makes the property less desirable.
The fact that mandates and minimums exist suggests that this is not the case; if parking paid for itself, no mandates would be necessary and developers would already be incentivized to build it by the market. In jurisdictions that have relaxed parking requirements, however, developers generally build less parking after the rules change (and sometimes as little as none). This shouldn't be too surprising: in cities with decent transit, at least some residents don't drive and so don't need the parking, so a market exists for housing without it, and parking is expensive to build, especially if it's underground, which is typical for multifamily residential construction in dense urban areas. Underground parking in the US typically costs ~$50k per space to build.
Number of staircases in my country is given by distance from furthest point (max 20m so you need to have 2 staircases if there is corridor longer then 20m). But when the distance is satisfied capacity can by met by dimensions of the particular staircase.
I'm looking at Billionaires Row in Manhattan, and I don't think they have two staircases. At 1400ft tall and 60ft wide, I don't think they have room. Regulations are for little people.
And since they're really financial instruments, the buildings are still only half full!
They use scissor stairs. That's two stairways in one stairwell, with the stairways winding around each other. They count as two exit stairways if (1) the stairways are enclosed in and separated from each other by masonry or masonry equivalent construction having at least a 2 hour fire resistance rating, and (2) the exit doors are 15 ft or more apart.
While they might work as far as providing residents two routes out in an emergency, they do present challenges to firefighters [1]:
> Jack J. Murphy, a former firefighter, fire marshal, and current chairman of the New York City High-Rise Fire Safety Directors Association, has inspected some of these buildings and says they present unique challenges for firefighters. For one, the buildings’ small footprints mean very narrow scissor stairwells that can have five or more turns between floors. “What would that do to my hose stretch?” Murphy said. The compact size also means tight quarters for operation and medical staging in an emergency.
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.
This is a fascinating thing for me, and it makes me want to truly study architecture. Though, like so many pieces of art and society, America my home seems to be sliding further from anything that doesn't optimize for money, or... optimization.
But the idea of code defining form, and how we can meld safety, efficiency and beauty together - that's interesting to me.
I found this article [1] on the wiki page of 5-over-1 and find it hilarious. It's an interesting and biting critique of a number of styles that are applied to 5-over-1. I wonder if we will ever have again in this country truly beautiful housing for the masses, or if we will look back on the 2000s and 2010s US as we do now, looking at Soviet bloc apartments from the 60s and 70s.
There’s plenty of old architecture that is utilitarian and for the poor. I think much of our romanticism for old architecture in the US is seen though the lens of survivorship bias. Construction in the US is fairly cheap and we tear down things down often, especially if it’s ugly. I’d rather look at the average US 5-over-1 than a Spanish corrala
> 5-over-1 buildings often feature secure-access interior hallways with residential units on both sides, which favors a U, E, C, or right-angle building shape.
The fire risk has very little to do with the material itself, and everything to do with how it's used. Steel buildings can fail even faster than wood once the steel reaches a superheated temperature, and wood can take an exceptionally long time to burn depending on multiple factors, from thickness, to oxygen, to fire travel pathways, to fireproof paneling.
The reason residential buildings are constructed with a given material is usually due to the regional cost of each material. Wood is cheap and plentiful in the USA, and we've adapted it very successfully with modern building codes. But of course that cost changes with scale, as wood is not nearly as strong and light as steel, or as stiff and compressive as concrete. And our somewhat antiquated zoning laws also limit newer construction methods like post-and-beam, which results in larger, cheaper, faster to construct wood-framed homes.
It's not just "fire in the stairway" that's a problem.
A number of high-fatality fires in structures over the years have involved a fire in one part of the building using an open stairway as a chimney to both fan the flames and to spread between levels. That's part of why the US stairways generally have fire doors that will "fail closed" at any fire alarm - by having the doors all closed, and (often) a ventilation system that overpressures stairwells somewhat, you have a clear space to evacuate, and, at worst, doesn't actively help the fire.
The alternative is that as a fire progresses on a lower level, the hot gasses find an open stairwell and head up, quite rapidly. The air coming in to replace this is effectively a forced draft for the fresh fire, and the hot gasses going up rapidly end up hot enough to start igniting things on other levels, in addition to making the stairwell totally unusable for evacuation. If you're unlucky, a well placed stairwell with a skylight that rapidly breaks from heat can turn a first floor fire into, quite literally, a very effective furnace with exceedingly poor containment.
This effect, unfortunately, has been demonstrated at great loss of life in various school fires and such over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collinwood_school_fire is one such, but there have been quite a few others over the years as well.
As much as it may be architecturally unpopular, the stairwell requirements in US buildings are one of those "written in blood" regulations that have very good historical evidence for why they exist.
What probably makes sense is to enforce that a measure of equal fire risk reduction is applied if reasonable.
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.
I am also sure this developer would love to accept full responsibility should a fire occur in a single stair building that prevented people from evac,
I am sure this developer would not hide behind the building codes, and exclaim they are not liable because the building was "built to code" after lobbing to have the code changed, no no...
I don’t think the goal is to increase the apartment capacity of existing multi-stair buildings.
Allowing single stair buildings facilitates multi family dwellings to be built on much smaller lots - even those that currently contain single family homes.
Changing that regulation is the basis for why cities like Paris can’t maintain New York level postulation density without many buildings greater than 6 floors.
Good point: I'm in a suburban area where land is much easier to come by, so it's less of an issue. Although even then, 3-bedroom apartments are as rare as... Something very rare. (It's Christmas, metaphors fail me at the moment.)
Anyway, if they built floor plans like this then I would want to see some seriously bulked up building codes to deal with fires. Also it always strikes me as odd that sprinkler systems are used to help with the fire, but smoke is what mostly kills and I rarely hear of emergency ventilation systems tied to fire alarms. If anyone knowledgeable on that sort of thing could chime in, I always love to learn why my ideas are wrong/bad.
Generally the obstacles to cheaper housing are political. For a building of a given footprint and height its normal for people to show up at planning meetings asking if they could maybe have fewer, larger apartments than they intended so that the new building causes less traffic. We have the technology to build buildings pretty high and the capital cost to do so is a small fraction of the reason housing prices are so high in major cities. I'm open to the idea that at the margin a little less safety for a little smaller cost might be a good or bad tradeoff but this isn't a decisive battle.
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, open staircases leading to each floor! Perhaps "Apartment Simulator 2022" will come out soon.
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.
Understood, and I'm willing to be wrong on this. My point is, over time and technology we accumulate restrictions that may no longer be as necessary as they were when they were put in. What if we don't need isolated stairwells so much anymore due to materials and fire suppression(sprinkler) regulations, for example? That's my point.
Ah, well I’m sure some enterprising architect is already arguing with a building department about it.
You definitely see them in some hotels and commercial buildings, though my understanding is despite sprinklers, they need to have autoclosing fire doors if that is the case, which are terrible to deal with every day. :s
The problem with sprinklers in California is if there is a serious earthquake, pipe breaks mean you lose fire water pressure right when you might need it most, and whole blocks can burn down.
Been awhile since that happened though so maybe the building department forgot?
Art was kind of redundant in that sentence. I meant that staircases are not aesthetically integrated with the building. They're accessible and meant for daily use, but are bare-bones with exposed piping, minimal heating, poor acoustics and heavy, loud fire doors.
I’d infinitely prefer to live in an apartment which is in walking distance from everything I need than some remote house where I have to drive all the time.
I find the current price and size of apartments to be perfectly fine.
If we're talking about cost reduction, "expand roadways, sewage, water, power and public transit rather than build extra stairwells" is an argument that falls apart quickly.
You have to first spread jobs out across the country, which is the hard part. Good luck! The white collar remote workforce is only a small section of the population.
There's plenty of space to spread out, it's not like this is a hard thing to find. Yet those areas tend to not be nearly as productive, and they have far fewer amenities for living.
If that's your thing, great, do it, you have your pick of geographies because nearly all of the US is empty space. But if that's not what a person wants, and instead they appreciate the things that humans can create and do for each other when there are many nearby, there are very very few locations available, the are all extremely pricy because the supply has been artificially constrained by reggulations of people who live in cities, but apparently don't want to live in cities.
Appartments buildings are orders of magnitude more efficient. Even on just heating and cooling. Not to mention the reduction in powered transport needed.
It seems possible to add a second stair case to this design. You’d just mirror the first over to where the courtyard is. You’d lose the courtyard and ability to see your neighbor, but it looks like the building could still be made to jut out some past the stairs to keep light on that side.
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.
I can imagine larger people getting stuck and causing blockages. I just can’t see any system better than stairs for fire escape. Even if we did eliminate the second fire escape, that saves something like 1sqm per unit which is probably worth like $10,000. If we split this cost over the 50+ years the building is expected to last for, it isn’t much of a cost if it provides even a small amount of extra safety.
> The purported reason for such rules is fire safety, though there’s no evidence that Americans and Canadians are any safer from structure fires than our neighbors around the world, where one-staircase construction is permitted even in buildings eight, 10, or 20 stories high.
That is quite a thing to dismiss. Is there evidence otherwise? Shouldn't we be looking at evidence that two staircases improves safety regardless of location?
Europe resolves the fire issue in other ways. Regulations that limit the number of units per floor (4 for Germany, 8 for Austria), regulations for maximum distance to stairwell, and often building height.
The building height one is significant as the balcony is often the second means of egress, via a fire truck ladder.
This is hardly the issue within the USA though. The biggest issue we have is a general resentment towards building anything. Once we've built up a lot - it would be a good discussion to have about whether what we're building could be improved. For the time being - we just need to build anything.
> North American multifamily building with nimbler designs from South Korea, China, Sweden, Italy, or Germany. In those countries, apartments in midrise buildings may be served by a single stair, often encircling or adjacent to the elevator
At least in China, this will be 180° opposite of what fire code says: a minimum of 2 staircases
Just the other day I was reading the Second Egress website (linked in the article) and found it fascinating. Lots of examples, images, details, data, etc.
A classic example of the safety ratchet and status-quo-ism. All these arguments work for mandated helmets in cars and other such things people would think absurd.
After all, 2 isn’t a Schelling point. So why not four staircases?
I want to be kind to the author, he or she is seriously misinformed. An extra staircase is not wasted space. It’s a life saver and standards exist for a reason.
Is sidewalk a wasted space, maybe slate should write a dumb article on how people can walk between the road and curb and save space.
How about parks ? Should they be 1m x 1m square patches of grass.
Would it be possible to construct a building that has four sides of apartments surrounding a central spiraling stairwell, but the stairwell is also adjacent to a conventional emergency stairwell that can be entered from every floor of the central stairwell? You would have to shrink all the apartments on one side of a building to make room for it, but I can see the layout in my head. Furthermore, you could connect another tower of apartments to the same emergency stairwell.
>Just think of how much smaller cars could be if we removed seatbelts and airbags!
A stairway is going to take up a lot more space in a building than seatbelts and airbags are. By my estimation my apartment building would lose over 10% of its living space by doubling its amount of staircases.
However, I doubt that it would make a big difference in the cost of housing itself. It seems to me that housing is pricey because it's an investment rather than the labor cost being prohibitive.
There's a lot of evidence that cars are made far safer with seatbelts and airbags. I don't think there's as much for school buses. The types of crashes, the skill of the drivers, the seats themselves, the size of the passengers versus the size of the seat backs, and the weight of school buses versus cars are quite different.
You mean comparing school buses without something and cars with something isn't fair? Just like comparing buildings in the US with something vs buildings in Europe without something isn't fair?
> Just think of how much smaller cars could be if we removed seatbelts and airbags!
I remember when cars had no airbags, and only lap belts on the front seats. Adding seatbelts and airbags didn't change the car size. The only difference I noticed in general was the loss or shrinking of the glove compartment (for the right airbag), and (for the left airbag) the horn button moving from the center of the steering wheel to somewhere else (usually one of the stalks).
I'm surprised that anyone could have that response after reading the article. It is very clearly talking about space wasted primarily in hallways and in the restrictions that requiring two stairways puts on floorplans.
Yep, that's what I'm talking about. Those things are important negative space. What would you get, one more apartment per floor? Let's not crawl over each other like ants.
Yes and when the fire alarm goes off every family crushes into that tiny space and tries to get down one staircase. Not to mention countless other bad situations. There's qualitative reasons not to maximize this. Build up one more floor, problem solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Osaka_building_fire
> The victims gasped for air and had difficulties escaping, as there was only one escape route, with the emergency stairs and elevators being located outside the clinic.
> Experts were surprised by the fire's high death toll. The authorities are investigating how victims became trapped and the floor filled up with smoke so quickly.
> Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Yasushi Kaneko ordered the inspection of some 30,000 buildings in Japan that have three or more floors, but only a single stairwell.