[HN Gopher] A collection of single egress buildings, illegal in ...
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A collection of single egress buildings, illegal in Canada
Author : yeknoda
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-01-09 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (secondegress.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (secondegress.ca)
| bearcobra wrote:
| I'm currently remodeling my house and our contractor recommended
| adding a fire suppression system as part of the project. I always
| assumed that would be something I couldnt afford but the quote
| was pretty reasonable (~2500) I wonder if these kinds of systems,
| plus advances in other building materials have reduced the risk
| profile to the point where multiple egress points are no longer
| needed
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Any amount of water you can get onto a fire increases
| survivability (both in time and number of locations). NFPA 13R
| is a relatively recent addition to fire code that focuses on
| making low-rise residential fire sprinklers much cheaper to
| install and that shows in the price quote you got.
|
| 13R allows use of existing plumbing connections. It doesn't
| require a separate feed from the water main, nor does it
| require a separate iron pipe network inside the structure. It
| also doesn't require extensive equipment like some commercial
| systems do (eg sensing when one sprinkler goes off and using
| high-pressure to force the whole zone of sprinklers to go off).
|
| > advances in other building materials
|
| Definitely not. You'd think we would require a quick spray-down
| of boric acid on wood stick construction right after framing.
| Boric acid (or borax) is an insect repellant, smolder
| suppressor, and fire retardant when used this way. It would -
| at minimum - slow the spread of structure fires. It is also
| dirt cheap. But nope... buildings themselves are just as
| flammable today as they were 50 years ago. Survivability is
| worse thanks to so much synthetic fabric and foam giving off
| really toxic fumes and more or less no requirement to make
| anything flame resistant.
|
| ---
|
| If you want to increase survivability in your own home:
|
| 1. If you can afford it have sprinklers installed. In most US
| states the cost is a lot less than you might think, well under
| $10k. Usually under $5k. Insurance can't replace lives nor
| keepsakes. Nor can it repair bodily injury. If you worry about
| water damage I can promise you repairing it is far cheaper than
| repairing smoke/fire damage.
|
| 2. Have working smoke detectors. Get 10-year sealed lithium
| ones. The day you install them set a reminder in you phone for
| 10 years from now to replace them. Install them in the
| recommended locations.
|
| 3. Sleep with your door closed. If you need air, crack a
| window. If your room doesn't circulate enough from a forced air
| system shave a bit off the bottom of the door. Experiments show
| even a cheap cardboard core door can provide 30 minutes of
| protection from a raging house fire. It blocks most of the
| smoke. It also greatly slows down heat transfer which reduces
| flashover risk. I'm not joking - you can find videos on the web
| where the hallway is a charred black hellscape but the
| bedding/carpet in a bedroom behind a closed door isn't even
| slightly blackened.
| chromatin wrote:
| Thanks for these reminders! #3 is especially important.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Just curious what the "fire suppression system" is in practice,
| is it sprinklers or specific fire retardant materials (drywall,
| shingles etc) used. Also wondering what geo location you are in
| (in consideration of regional fire risks and codes).
|
| Edit: would assume single/multiple egress points are tied to
| the human capacity limit for the building but am not an
| arch/civil engineer
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Wow, being European and used to single-stairwell multi-story
| buildings, the North American obsession with fire escapes has
| always seen weird, and it's super interesting that its
| codification causes the economy of mid-rises to not work out,
| which in turn causes the weird housing distribution of North
| American cities. The "missing middle", that the site is talking
| about.
| vkou wrote:
| Fire codes aren't the reason that you can't build in most of
| North America.
|
| NIMBYism, and the cultural obsession with low-density, single-
| family homes only made possible by car-centric transportation
| infrastructure is.
|
| Which is also in no small part caused by a financial and tenant
| rights system that pushes people towards home ownership,
| instead of renting.
| astrange wrote:
| Part of the car-centric infrastructure is fire codes.
| American towns have lots of fire departments which all refuse
| to buy smaller European-style fire trucks, and all roads have
| to be built to fit what they buy.
|
| European buildings are also less likely to be made out of
| wood, which is good if you care about fire safety that much.
| vkou wrote:
| > Part of the car-centric infrastructure is fire codes.
|
| No, it's not. Cheap gas[0], giant freaking interstates, and
| public transit systems (when they are even present) that
| are very clearly built for the 'poors' are.
|
| Another 3% to the per-square-foot-cost of building a multi-
| tenant building aren't the reason that Houston has 12 and
| 16-lane highways cutting right through the city, or why it
| takes an hour to travel by bus in Stockton a distance that
| you could travel in 10 minutes by car.
|
| Fitting fire trucks is a problem for _local_ , last-mile
| streets[1], not arterials, and availability of arterials
| (and lack of availability of alternatives) are what plays a
| large part in how people get around.
|
| [0] Under $3.20/gallon in most of the country, compared to
| over $7/gallon in most of Europe. Not to mention the
| double-whammy of generally lower[2] European wages.
|
| [1] Most American suburbs solve the width-of-last-mile-
| street problem by simply... Not having sidewalks. It's not
| like there's anywhere you can walk _to_ from them...
|
| [2] Okay, okay, yes, Western European take-home incomes for
| low-paying jobs tend to be higher than their American
| counterparts.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| There's probably a fire escape somewhere that you haven't
| noticed. When I lived in a 23-storey building it had a second
| fire escape stairwell and a fire escape ladder outside next to
| the garbage chutes. I now live in a 9-storey building and it
| has a fire escape ladder bolted next to the balconies.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > There's probably a fire escape somewhere that you haven't
| noticed.
|
| No.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| synu wrote:
| I think it comes from the houses being made out of wood instead
| of brick. Or at least it seems likely comparing houses in the
| Netherlands and US. The way houses burn is just totally
| different.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| That's what I am thinking. It's hard to imagine a scenario
| where the brick house I grew up in Germany could burn down
| but my US house would probably burn completely once the wood
| in the walls has caught fire.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Yeah, that might be a big part of it. I was shocked to
| discover how flimsy multi-story houses are constructed in
| North America compared to what I'm used to.
|
| Every single apartment I've lived in in Stockholm has had a
| single stairwell, and it's not something I've ever thought
| about because no-one thinks of it as an issue. But on the
| other hand, those stairwells are always concrete and stone
| and marble, and fire regulations forbid you from storing
| _anything_ in the stairwells or outside your apartment.
|
| Take my current Stockholm apartment, there's a four-storey
| drop from the balcony to the ground and a single stairwell,
| which would apparently horrify every North American.
|
| But the walls are concrete. The walls between apartments are
| concrete or drywall. There's four apartments per landing. The
| apartment doors are made of steel. And the stairwell is empty
| and marbled, so there's _nothing_ that can burn in the
| stairwell, and it 's very difficult for fire to spread from
| one apartment to the others. There's no sprinkler system, but
| I think there's a fire extinguisher on each landing.
|
| Not a problem.
| oivey wrote:
| If an apartment is on fire between yours and the stairwell
| and that fire extends to the hallway, then you're dead,
| right? If there was a second stairwell on the opposite side
| then you'd still be able to escape.
|
| I'm pretty sure sprinklers have been shown to massively
| increase fire safety.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > and that fire extends to the hallway, then you're dead,
| right?
|
| The point is that this can't happen for a number of
| reasons. The landings in my building are quite small,
| four doors and a stairwell, it's literally two meters
| from my apartment door to the stairwell, there are no
| long corridors. And there's nothing that can burn in the
| stairwell, it's all concrete and stone and steel. And all
| the apartment doors are steel as well.
|
| The dangers of apartment fires are mitigated
| _differently_ , so that there is no need for a second
| stairwell or fire escape.
|
| And this is something I didn't see on the site, and which
| is probably where they're a bit wrong and misguided. Just
| because actual fire statistics are better in Europe than
| in North America despite allowing single stairwells, it
| doesn't mean you can remove the requirement from the
| Ontario building code and everything will be fine and
| dandy. You have to add all the other things that mitigate
| fire hazards.
| colinb wrote:
| (I think that) Flimsy ~= less likely to fall down in an
| earthquake. When I moved from Ireland to California I moved
| into a two storey (1940s?) apartment apparently constructed
| from drinking straws and toilet paper. But... a few weeks
| later the area was struck by a significant quake. Part of
| the freeway fell down. I was woken from sleep by the
| building swaying and creaking. But it didn't fall down.
|
| Try your Stockholm apartment in that.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| This doesn't make sense.
|
| The US can obviously build earthquake-proof concrete and
| steel skyscrapers, just look at the entire SF downtown.
| So if you can do that, why wouldn't you be able to build
| earthquake-proof _midrise_ buildings out of concrete and
| steel?
|
| When I lived in SF I was woken one night by an
| earthquake, the entire 42-story high-rise I was living in
| was swaying back and forth, but obviously didn't
| collapse.
|
| Sure, I can see how a wooden construction is a _cheaper_
| way to make buildings earthquake-proof, but does it
| really cost that much to earthquake-proof a mid-rise? Or
| is it not economically feasible to build mid-rises out of
| anything but wood in the first place?
| sgc wrote:
| Well, because midrise buildings hit a horrible resonance
| with the frequency of earthquakes and are the type of
| building most at risk, and because those huge skyscrapers
| have pendulum counterweights, wheels they roll on 100 ft
| in the ground, and it just costs way too much to use that
| tech in a smaller building.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| A lot of new construction in the urban US is similar - once
| you reach a certain level of density.
|
| I live in a row-style apartment building in NYC built
| within the last decade, which is 6 floors, 2 apartments per
| floor, steel frame with concrete floors. There is a single
| interior stairwell, also all cinderblock. We have
| restrictions on what can be stored in common space.
|
| NYC categorizes this type of construction as "fireproof" -
| which basically means that in case of fire, unless the fire
| is in your unit, it is expected to be safer for you to
| remain in your apartment and await evacuation than to enter
| smoke-filled hallways. Any fire is expected to be
| contained.
|
| The city's other category of dwelling is "non-fireproof",
| and non-fireproof buildings require multiple forms of
| egress. You need multiple ways out because the fire is
| expected to spread.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > The city's other category of dwelling is "non-
| fireproof", and non-fireproof buildings require multiple
| forms of egress.
|
| Cool!
|
| That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and since the
| site is specifically about the building codes of Ontario,
| arguing for adapting a building code similar to the one
| you describe for NYC is probably a much better way of
| making your case, rather than posting a bunch of artsy
| floorplans from recent projects in various European
| cities...
| NickBusey wrote:
| Yes, our obsession with not wanting to burn to death. So weird.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Theatre_fire
|
| Or more recent and relevant, an apartment fire:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Bronx_apartment_fire
| petesergeant wrote:
| Do more Western Europeans burn to death than Americans?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I feel this is something you can check yourself and bring
| back to the thread instead of asking rhetorically, as if
| it's obvious that they don't.
| [deleted]
| voz_ wrote:
| Europe is behind on a lot of safety infrastructure compared to
| the US. You frame it as obsession, but really it's just good
| policy.
|
| > which in turn causes the weird housing distribution of North
| American cities.
|
| This is a hilarious misunderstanding of the complex
| intersection of class divides, race divides, gerrymandering,
| history (white flight), nimbyism, and for-profit zoning that
| has led to the current lack of mid-rise affordable housing.
| boredumb wrote:
| white flight is a pejorative, the correct term is reverse-
| gentrification
| astrange wrote:
| This appears to be a dumb joke but the opposite of
| gentrification is "disinvestment".
| michaelt wrote:
| _> You frame it as obsession, but really it 's just good
| policy._
|
| Well, there are alternative ways to reduce the risks
| presented by a fire in the primary staircase trapping people
| inside.
|
| For example, good sprinkler coverage of the primary
| staircase, strict rules prohibiting storing anything
| flammable below the staircase or running electrical wiring
| there, compartmentation so there's time for the fire brigade
| to arrive before a fire can spread between homes, housing
| options for vulnerable citizens so only able-bodied people
| have to evacuate via the stairs, and so on.
|
| Of course, many American buildings are made of wood, so it's
| understandable why American fire codes look different to
| European ones - and if I had to be in a burning building but
| could choose the design, an American-style single storey
| suburban home where every room has a window you can climb out
| of at ground floor level is hard to beat!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's just good policy_
|
| Is there any empirical data on the safety benefits of a
| second stairwell?
| voz_ wrote:
| In the spirit of curiosity - how would you go about
| measuring that? A counterfactual is almost impossible.
|
| That being said - when in doubt, I favor more regulation
| for safety, not less.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how would you go about measuring that?_
|
| Death and injury frequencies. Anecdotes of preventable
| deaths, _e.g._ where one stairwell was not enough versus
| where a corridor separating two stairwells became,
| itself, an obstacle. Drill simulations.
|
| We should have have _some_ basis for the rule. (If we don
| 't, I'd support scrapping it.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| You could measure it by people who perish in structure
| fires, a metric on which America is far behind Europe.
| rwmj wrote:
| You'd need to weigh that against the costs and lost
| opportunities. If no one can buy an affordable apartment
| and overengineering is part of the cause, or if many die
| because of a car-centric culture because you can't built
| densely enough, that can be a problem.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| I'd wager most of the US deaths occur in single-family
| homes--in basements (illegally housed), or even while
| sleeping in rooms with plenty of opportunity for egress.
| harywilke wrote:
| This got me curious. Best i could find was the CTIF (The
| International Association of Fire and Rescue Services)
| [1] and their annual report [2].
|
| Table 1.2 shows a breakdown of fire deaths per 100 fires.
| US 0.3 France, Germany 0.1 Greece, UK, Belgium 0.2
| Poland, Denmark, Slovakia 0.4
|
| So it's a bit of a mixed bag. The reported average was
| 0.5 (report didn't cover every country). Sadly Canada
| wasn't in the table.
|
| Japan at 3.8 was a bit of a surprise.
|
| 1. https://ctif.org/world-fire-statistics 2. https://ctif
| .org/sites/default/files/2022-08/CTIF_Report27_E...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _white flight, nimbyism_
|
| Is it truly unreasonable to want to move away from places
| where crime is rising and cleanliness and living standards
| are falling? Isn't it a bit unfair to ascribe that desire to
| the level of whiteness of a person?
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's a historical fact that got named after its most
| obvious feature. They _were_ white people.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Don't get triggered. Nobody is talking about you or calling
| you a bad person.
| mc32 wrote:
| Agreed. If we went on calling bad things by the predominant
| population which engages in negative practices, most people
| would object.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I mean, there's still more people who die in fires in the US
| than in the EU, thanks mostly thanks to space heaters on
| 120v/15A circuits and absolutely zero retrofit requirements
| on anything (what do you mean I can have K&T and a Federal
| Pacific Panel that does not trip on overcurrent in my house
| with no GFCI/AFCI protection but every single new circuit I
| add needs to have those?). The US/Canada have gone too far
| into "new housing stock needs to be perfect" and not enough
| into "existing housing stock needs to be retrofitted",
| because not pissing off landlords and boomer homeowners is a
| main policy goal.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The decision to not require retrofitting of existing,
| undisturbed construction means that new code can evolve
| more quickly to adopt new technologies or safer methods. If
| every 15A and 20A residential outlet had to have AFCI
| protection as of some specified date, I can tell you that
| date would be sometime still in the future from now.
| Requiring it only for new construction or new circuits
| means it could be phased in starting in 1999.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| "Now for new construction and retrofit everyone in 10-15
| years" would make much more sense. Especially for things
| like GFCI/AFCI protection which is much more useful in
| old circuits than new.
| googlryas wrote:
| A cursory search says 3k Americans die in house fires, and
| 5k Europeans die in house fires per year, so probably EU
| had more fire deaths per capita. But it's hard to tell
| because EU doesn't have a FEMA equivalent collecting data
| on residential fire deaths.
|
| https://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/residential-fires/
|
| https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/our-
| focus/statist...
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Hang on, this article is explicitly about mid-rise
| buildings and the fire safety of one vs two stairwells in
| those, so you can't drag up statistics that show combined
| data for all housing types. I'm assuming a large chunk of
| those fire deaths are people dying because they
| accidentally burned down their single-family single-story
| building. That's completely irrelevant in this case so
| you have to separate that out.
| sokoloff wrote:
| This sub thread got into the angle of general forced
| retrofit of new code requirements, and claimed a general
| loss of life from fires being higher in the US making
| introduction of facts about fire deaths overall relevant
| IMO.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > I mean, there's still more people who die in fires in the
| US than in the EU
|
| False - and it's not even close. Europe has almost a full
| order of magnitude more death from residential fires than
| the US - house fires caused 2,620 deaths over 5 years in
| the US [0] vs ~5000/yr in Europe [1].
|
| [0] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/house-fire-
| stati... [1]
| https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/our-
| focus/statist...
| comte7092 wrote:
| >house fires caused 2,620 deaths over 5 years in the US
|
| Your source says that was 2,620 per year further down in
| the article:
|
| >House fires cause an average of 2,620 civilian deaths
| each year.
|
| Given that the EU has a significantly higher population
| than the US (~500 million, the EU data may or may not
| have included the UK, vs ~330 million) the per capita
| statistics end up fairly close.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > Europe is behind on a lot of safety infrastructure compared
| to the US.
|
| That's a rather sweeping statement.
|
| > and for-profit zoning that has led to the current lack of
| mid-rise affordable housing.
|
| Yes, it's a complicated issue with tons of causes, but what
| this site is saying is that the requirement for a second
| stairwell skews the economy of building mid-rises so much
| that they become unfeasible for developers (In Ontario) even
| if all the other factors were to be fixed. And so you're
| stuck with either high-rises or single-story buildings.
| barbazoo wrote:
| This is the more interesting link outlining the actual problem:
|
| https://secondegress.ca/A-Wicked-Problem
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| I still fail to understand: is slapping an escape ladder on the
| side of the house THAT expensive?
| hedora wrote:
| So, the complaint is that they don't want to stick a fire door on
| the back of new buildings, since it would undermine some
| architectural design purity or something?
| ripley12 wrote:
| This is a snarky low-effort comment. Do better.
| scrumper wrote:
| The thesis isn't particularly clear but what I think they want
| is a modification to Canadian building code so that structures
| up to a certain size don't need a second egress. They want
| that, I think, because that aspect of code makes it hard to
| design housing that sits in the middle of the scale between
| single family homes and high rises. That middle tier of housing
| seems like it could be important if you consider what NIMBY-ism
| and a shortage of housing is doing to some cities.
|
| I couldn't find out out _why_ a second fire exit makes it hard
| though. Maybe it's not the door, but the need for an extra
| stairwell?
|
| I'd hesitate to call it pretentious wank just because I don't
| understand it, so let's just say that the site was clearly not
| written for a lay audience.
| monknomo wrote:
| Requiring two egresses usually means that the building will
| not have an apartment that spans the width of the building,
| instead there will be a central hallway to connect every
| apartment to two stairwells.
|
| That central hallway seems small, but it eats a fairly
| substantial percentage of the footprint space of the
| building. (elevators and trashrooms are also examples of
| things that eat a lot of footprint; limiting them for smaller
| buildings is beneficial for floorplan efficiency)
|
| And since people do not like bedrooms without windows, having
| apartments that don't span the width of a building limits
| possible floorplans, and drives the apartment design towards
| studios and 1 bedrooms.
|
| The buildings tend to become very wide in order to
| accommodate enough apartments to make them worthwhile to
| build, so they tend to use up a high percentage of the lot
| they are sited on, which reduces greenspace and other
| resident amennities.
| nradov wrote:
| In most areas, the building code explicitly requires a
| window in every bedroom. This serves as an additional
| emergency exit, either directly on the ground floor or with
| assistance from firefighters on higher storeys.
| bbojan wrote:
| Ironically, in Toronto, not every bedroom is required to
| have a window [1].
|
| [1] BCC Ruling No. 14-03-1366: https://web.archive.org/we
| b/20210422142050/http://www.mah.go...
| henrikschroder wrote:
| You have to go digging on that site a little bit to get to
| the why:
|
| "The building typology of five to six-storey apartment
| buildings usually involves a single shared central stair,
| accessed directly from the street with typically two to four
| dwelling units per floor. However, because the Ontario
| Building Code requires two means of egress, mid-rise
| buildings in Toronto are designed with two exit stairs
| connected by a common corridor. The result is that mid-rise
| construction only proves feasible on larger sites where
| around ten or more units can fit within a typical floor plan
| to achieve an efficient floor area ratio. Zeidler explains
| that "this appears to be a reasonable precaution for life
| safety. However, the life safety of this single stair type in
| Europe has been equal to, if not better than ours," due to
| the fact that the single stair scheme is shared between fewer
| units. By changing the code requirement for two exit stairs,
| apartment buildings of midrise height could be designed
| around a single common stair. For instance, a point-access
| block, the dominant housing typology in dense urban contexts
| like Berlin, Paris, or Barcelona, is currently not permitted
| in Canada."
|
| https://secondegress.ca/A-Wicked-Problem
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| A big chunk of why is the % of floor area that is used for
| housing versus "support". Basically a single stair layout
| gives you 90-95% floor efficiency, and a double stair is
| closer to 80-85%. People don't rent common spaces like
| stairs, so you can bring the value of a building up by ~10%
| by allowing each apartment to have only a single exit
| staircase. Also if a lot is small (like 20ft wide or less),
| you have to compromise the design. For instance, instead of
| having full-floor units that get cross ventilation (windows
| at front and back), you may need to have duplex units that
| take up 40% of the front or back (so only get one side of the
| building).
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Its the second stairwell.
| tlb wrote:
| Most of the buildings on the page are multistory. A door on the
| ground floor isn't a big deal, but above that they require fire
| escape stairs, which are big and ugly and create a section with
| poor views out the windows.
| scotty79 wrote:
| All examples seem to be about single stairs vs pair of stairs.
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Which is the key issue. The second set of stairs is needed
| for the second egress.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Not really, they are saying that the requirement for a second
| egress in multi-apartment buildings (which is not only a second
| fire door, it is also a second stair, etc.) makes too
| costly/complex mid size buildings.
|
| The first image on this page exemplifies the issue:
|
| https://secondegress.ca/A-Wicked-Problem
|
| https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9b6f13e0414b47f094ad...
| eklitzke wrote:
| I don't understand. I live in a three-story apartment
| building in San Francisco that has about 20 units (ground
| floor is retail space, the upper two floors have 10 apartment
| units each). There's a single entrance and stairwell in my
| building. However my building also has two fire escapes (one
| of which is accessible via the hallway, I think the other
| fire escape is only accessible by certain apartment units)
| and an additional wooden staircase in the back that leads to
| the garbage area. I don't know all the zoning laws, but this
| is an extremely common layout in SF. My building, like many
| many other buildings in the city, was built in 1906 after the
| earthquake, and all of the building built in this time period
| have a very similar style and layout.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| According to the article, it's buildings with 2-4 units per
| floor that are significantly impacted by this rule. At 10
| per floor, your building is a lot larger than the ones the
| article is talking about.
| astrange wrote:
| It's very common, especially in places like SF, for all the
| old buildings and neighborhoods that people actually like
| to be illegal to build if they were new.
|
| Of course, in SF it's practically illegal to build anything
| under any circumstances if any of your neighbors decide
| they don't like it.
| twblalock wrote:
| That sounds fair on the surface, but we manage to build
| multi-egress buildings all the time in other countries, and
| if a single stairwell is the only egress a lot of people
| could die in a fire. Some of these mod-sized buildings are
| too tall to make jumping out of a window a realistic option.
| So I'm not really sympathetic to this argument.
|
| Unlike some building codes, this one is directly connected to
| a life and death issue and we have seen what happens in fires
| where people can't get out.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, it seems to me that we can actually work out the
| situations involved, and being on the sixth floor of a
| building with only one fire egress seems undesirable.
|
| Perhaps it can be compensated for with various "either two
| egresses OR each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof
| for X minutes" or something, and bring back hook and ladder
| trucks (arguably which are not used as much because
| buildings now have multiple egresses when that tall).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof for X
| minutes
|
| This is the kind of absurdly complex regulation that
| sounds simple, but is a lobbyist's dream. Two exits are
| easy to know when you've implemented, and easy for
| regulators to check if you've implemented. A "bedroom"
| being "fire proof" for X minutes will involve 900 pages
| of nonsense regulations from which lobbyists have
| carefully removed anything that will affect their bottom
| line.
|
| "Each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof for X
| minutes" was the type of rule that caused the fire
| brigades to tell people in Grenfell to stay in their
| apartments, and even more importantly the type of rule
| that allowed contractors to claim compliance to was
| sufficient enough that they could use flammable, shit
| cladding that was illegal in Europe and the US, and
| install it incompetently (because if the units were
| "fireproof," who could care?)
| bombcar wrote:
| Very good points - and Grenfell is an example as to why
| these regulations exist; otherwise people would burn to
| death in "missing middle" housing and nobody would really
| care much.
| nasmorn wrote:
| I live in Vienna and almost all buildings are single
| staircases with 4-8 floors. Almost all house fires are in
| old housing stock. In new concrete apartment buildings it
| is usually a single apartment that burns out. It is an
| almost absurd fear compared to eg traffic related deaths.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Except what this site says is that counter-intuitively,
| this policy doesn't save lives, it's actually the opposite:
|
| "Zeidler explains that "this appears to be a reasonable
| precaution for life safety. However, the life safety of
| this single stair type in Europe has been equal to, if not
| better than ours," due to the fact that the single stair
| scheme is shared between fewer units."
|
| And that's the thing, _entire countries_ disagree on the
| necessity of a second stairwell for fire safety, and there
| 's data to back up the position.
|
| But because a lot of people in North America have those
| (unfounded) fears, the second stairwell is part of the
| building code, and as a result an entire class of buildings
| don't get built because the economics don't work out.
| twblalock wrote:
| > But because a lot of people in North America have those
| (unfounded) fears, the second stairwell is part of the
| building code, and as a result an entire class of
| buildings don't get built because the economics don't
| work out.
|
| I don't believe the fears are unfounded, and frankly I
| don't see why anyone should buy what this Zeidler guy is
| selling -- if what he is saying is true, all it means is
| that European buildings should also be changed to have
| multiple egress options for every unit!
|
| Seriously, would you be willing to live on the 6th floor
| of a building where the only way out in a fire is a
| single staircase? Don't look at statistics to decide
| this: even if you would be safe most of the time, it only
| takes one outlier incident to kill you, so why put
| yourself in that situation?
| WWLink wrote:
| I'm siting here pondering how adding a second stairway to
| a building makes it economically unfeasible. What kinda
| crappy buildings are you making where the stairway is
| that substantial to the cost of the construction?
|
| And in low rise buildings, there's usually a LOT of
| stairways lol. A typic suburban US apartment complex has
| a half dozen buildings, and each one has maybe 12
| apartments and like 4 stairways.
| astrange wrote:
| Adding a second stairway typically requires rearranging
| the building to be double-loaded (having a central
| hallway with apartments exclusively on either side),
| which wastes much more space, only allows windows on one
| side of the apartment, feels like you live in a hotel
| etc.
|
| https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-
| sta...
| frickinLasers wrote:
| What's wrong with fire escapes? I see plenty of space to
| add those to a point access block.
| squokko wrote:
| How many fire deaths are worth how much housing?
| Inaccessibility of housing is tied to economic destitution,
| homelessness, and other things that directly cause deaths.
| It's entirely possible for more quality-adjusted life years
| to be lost in the path that causes less housing to be
| built.
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