I work part time at a small club and I’ve been part time over a year and in that year they have had four fire drills.
Of course all went well.
So two days ago a small fire broke out on the top floor. It was the size of a garbage can, so it was big enough but hardly an inferno.
Well as you can imagine, our dutily planned fire drills of one per quarter worked out, well they didn’t
It was an utter mess. Choas. I kept thinking, man if this had been a “real fire” everyone would be dead. It was like something out of Seinfeld, where George pushed the little old lady out of the way.
People were running and screaming and it was mess.
So has anyone else had similar experiences in life. What’s the saying, the best laid plans go amok or something?
This is not quite the same thing, but the following happened when I was in elementary school.
The teachers & principal were finishing up an early morning meeting as we were coming into school. Someone asked, “I wonder how the children would behave during a fire drill if no adults were around.” “Let’s find out,” said the principal as he set of the fire alarm. We all looked around for a few seconds and then filed out in orderly fashion just as we had been taught to do.
This school also used to practice finding alternate exits by blocking one normal exit just before the fire drill.
I’ve been in real life situations where a fire alarm went off – one at work and one at my gym – and in neither case were there people running and screaming. IMHO something is seriously wrong at your club!
As it turns out, yes, that’s pretty much what happens.
Consider the fire at The Station back in 2003, where some pyrotechnics that were part of Great White’s opening song ignited acoustic foam on the walls of the nightclub.
Granted, attendees at a nightclub will not have practiced a fire drill beforehand, but the traffic jam shows how a little panic can strip people of their rationality and their ability to think their way out of trouble - and the fact that three of the four exits were relatively underutilized shows how keeping a cool head in a crisis can help you survive even when everyone around you is wetting their pants in unthinking terror.
For some first-person perspective, here’s footage from a cameraman in attendance at the concert. He’s no dummy: as soon as the pyrotechnics stop and the walls continue burning, he knows trouble is afoot and so he begins moving toward the exit and manages to get out before the crowd jams up into an impenetrable wall of meat in the narrow hallway. If you’re not clear on the meaning of “impenetrable wall of meat,” wait until the 2:00 mark: you will see bodies of the living piled six feet high in the doorway, preventing the people behind them from escaping and ensuring they succumb to smoke inhalation.
Admittedly, it can be hard to keep a cool head. A few months ago we had a small fire at work. I was there when it happened, and my first thought was to find a fire extinguisher. I started hurriedly looking around for one, forgetting what we had learned in our safety training: fire extinguishers are always positioned near exits so that you aren’t tempted to go further into a building looking for one. Duh, there was an outside door, and a fire extinguisher, right next to where we (and the fire) were. My coworker spotted/grabbed it first, but he struggled to remove the pin. I finally realized that he had been squeezing the handle in a death grip, locking the pin in place (this, in spite of us having been through hands-on training in the use of a fire extinguisher). Once we finally got the pin out, we were able to extinguish the fire without further incident. Nobody got hurt, and there was no significant property damage, but a larger fire near more flammable/explosive material might have been disastrous due to our lack of coolheadedness.
Almost none of the people evacuating from the plane that landed in the Hudson remembered to take a seat cushion or a life vest from under their seats. How many times had they heard the safety spiel?
Yeah, but if you walk up to me and ask me conversationally “Where are the life vests on an airplane?” I’d tell you “Oh, under the seat!” and probably make some joke about using the seat cushion as a floatation device.
This question is near and dear to my heart because I’m a flight instructor. I spend a lot of time training pilots for emergencies, and I have thought a lot about how we do it.
In the submarine movie Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman plays the captain and he initiates a training drill just after an actual fire has taken place on the boat. His first officer later disagrees and Hackman explains that confusion and panic are nothing to fear, but rather something to be trained for.
To me, this means training is not just about learning to take the correct actions, but attempting to replicate the emotional state of an emergency. So I work hard to create realistic emergency scenarios in the airplane that get the student’s heart rate up. A lot of instructors are fairly predictable in how they simulate emergencies, so I try to really mix it up and hit them when they’re not ready for it.
A couple of my students have found themselves in situations that weren’t outright emergencies, but were abnormal. They handled them just fine. I’ve been in two emergency situations and one that could have turned into one, and they all got handled. In my case, I think it helped that I teach this sort of thing every day because I reacted very quickly out of deeply ingrained patterns.
With all that said, I have absolutely no confidence that I would react correctly - or even logically - in a situation with which I had no familiarity. I’ve talked about this with a friend who is a police officer. If I were to find myself in a situation where shots were being fired I’d have no idea what to do. I hope my background might give me a slight edge in keeping a cool head, but I’m only trained to deal with airplane emergencies. I’d much rather have a failed engine that have to dodge bullets.
We have fire drills at work on a regular basis. Instead of just running out the door, I’m supposed to go check the restrooms in the middle of a warehouse full of paper. During the drills, I dutifully go to the restrooms and open the doors. If I ever smell smoke when the alarm sounds, whoever is in the restroom will be on their own, because I’m going to be out the door posthaste.