Once, I was on the 19th floor of a 25-story office building when the fire alarm went off and we had to walk down the fire escape. I was surprised at how slowly we moved downstairs, because there were so many people evacuating it at the same time.
(The cause turned out to be a small electrical fire on the 24th or 25th floor.)
Fire evacuation drills in high-occupancy multi-story buildings involve staggering the evacuation of the floors, because if everybody enters the stairwell at the same time, there’s massive congestion. And, apart from this hampering firefighters trying to enter the building, it of course delays people who are trying to leave it. But those people no longer have whatever protection is offered by their fire-resistant apartment doors, etc.
In buildings which have audible alarm systems, the alarms don’t go off on every floor whenever there’s a fire on any floor; they go off on the floor of the fire and nearby floors; on other floors they only go off when someone has taken a decision that those floors need to be evacuated. (And, as noted, the evacuations will be staggered.) And of course this requires trained people on site to manage the firefighting and evacuation, and take the necessary decisions.
If Grenfell Tower had had such a system, an evacuation could have been better managed. Likewise a sprinkler system might have helped, although as the fire flared up the outside of the building it’s not clear how much help an internal sprinker system would have been. But none of this would have been necessary if the building hadn’t burned in the way it did, and at this point that seems to be down to poor design/construction choices.
This is so wrong. You mean to tell me your building never had a fire drill with a properly set up warden system. That the people in your building were not trained what do when the alarm went off.
In a properly trained and built high rise this is what should have happened. Assume fire on the 24th floor on a 25 story building. A high rise should be a relocation not a evacuation building.
Small electrical fire starts o 24th floor. Smoke detector trips fire alarm system. If 3 floor evacuation then the alarms on the 23rd, 24rd, and 25th floors should go off. The people should be trained to relocate 3 floors down. those on 23 go to 20. Those on 24 to 21, and those on 25 to 22. If it is a 5 floor relocation the alarms go off on 22, 23, 24, 25, and the roof. And everyone goes down 5 floors.
In a short period of time the fire safety director (one is required to be in the building when normally occupied) should begin to make announcements, 1st to all floor except the involved floors, this announcement is along the line that there is an emergency and that everyone should stay where they are and to not use any elevators. The next announcement should tell the receiving floors that there is an emergency on the floors above and people will be coming on to the receiving floor through the emergency doors. And the fire alarm panel should be left in alarm until it has been determined that there is no fire or the fire department silences the panel. And the fire safety director should make the necessary announcements every few minutes to keep the people in the build aware of what is going on.
A active fire alarm means that ADA is no longer in effect. Anyone who can not go down stairs unassisted should remain on the floor they are located on with an assistant. The floor warden should communicate to the fire safety director that there is someone needing assistance.
B
I have seen several times a figure quoted of London alone having 4,000 tower blocks similar to Grenfell tower, although it is never made clear whether they are similar in terms of height, construction, age, or all criteria. Given the propensity for local governments to throw up these hideous piggeries during the sixties and seventies it would not surprise me for there to be ten thousand of them in the UK as a whole, and the primary reason for building in this style was not that the buildings were in any way optimal, but that they were cheap.
Given the numbers of buildings and residences in each building, there have been huge numbers of fires in such blocks over the last 40-50 years and generally speaking they have not been major tragedies. For all their shortcomings in terms of alarms, sprinklers, staircases, evacuation strategies etc. (to say nothing of the horrendous quality of life in them) from a fire perspective these buildings do not seem to have been especially dangerous to live in until recently - which suggests that the people who originally designed them weren’t completely daft. The major issues have historically been shortcuts in construction and maintenance causing the damn things to become uninhabitable and/or collapse.
What does seem to have been criminally idiotic was repeatedly making major changes to the interior and exterior of the buildings without assessing the likely impact to fire risks and then appropriately amending either the planned changes or improving the fire protection in place, or both. As a consequence the fuel load/distribution and fire propagation avenues can now be absolutely terrifying when set against the level of protection.
Another consideration is that if a building is run by multiple layers of penny-pinchers with no personal responsibility who can self-certify with no government inspectors to keep them in line then it really doesn’t matter what is specified in the way of alarms, sprinklers, stairwells etc. They will all eventually become unserviceable, removed, blocked etc etc. and the place will still be a deathtrap in reality even though it looks A-OK on paper. This is the classic problem you see in third world countries where the building regs are world-class but in reality never applied.
600 or so blocks affected in the UK according to the latest figures.
I have no experience with high rise buildings, but that sounds like a college textbook, not real life. Does any building anywhere actually have trained a “fire safety director” on staff? Fire wardens? I can’t imagine the expense of having such people employed in every high rise for the one in a million case of a fire. Perhaps you are correct, I don’t know. But it seems unlikely in the extreme.
When I worked at the State of Illinois center in Chicago, a large complex with several towers (the one I was in at Randolph and Michigan) we did indeed have floor safety personnel. I know this because after 9/11 I was one of them. We took this on in addition to our regular jobs, and were trained in crowd control and what to do in the event of several different types of emergencies and not just fire (which was probably why we were called “floor safety wardens” and not “fire wardens”.) We practiced not just full-evacuation fire drills where the entire building was emptied into Millennium Park (including the disabled) but also “affected floor and floor above and below” drills. The only paid position was what you might call a “fire warden” although the exact title was a bit different and encompassed other duties as well. You don’t need full-time personnel in that sort of position, and what to do isn’t rocket science. You do need people trained on proper procedures, and you do need some practice in them among building inhabitants.
And it’s NOT a “one in a million” chance of a fire in a high rise - they are actually much more common than that. The difference is that most of the time the damage is very localized and poses little to no risk outside the immediate area. That’s one of things that makes Grenfell stand out - even in public housing which is notorious for being cheap and prone to fire it is extremely unusual for a fire to get so out of control.
Grenfell Tower was a public housing project that was being renovated.
The residents were a big mix of people from all over the world and speak a lot of different languages. In such places, the registered tenant is sometimes not the same as the people who actually live there, these are illegal tenancies. Moreover, some of the apartments would be privately owned (there was a policy of selling public housing.) They would have been internally renovated to a high standard and rented out to professionals. Some would have been on AirB&B and have tenants changing every few days. Sometimes less formal rentals may have housed migrant workers. Some residents may be illegal immigrants, who would be reluctant to identify themselves to the authorities. Some caught in the disaster may have just been visiting. A cross section of the London working population living on top of each other and with it a whole host of issues related to housing.Identifying who the victims are and supporting the survivors will be a long and difficult process. I guess social media may be both a help and a hindrance.
This is all a world away from a well maintained privately owned and managed apartment block. Most of the time the tenants had to fight to get the managers of the tower block to honour their obligations.The residents of tower blocks across London and the rest of the UK are anxiously waiting to find out whether their block is vulnerable to a similar disaster and it may be that a lot of people may need to be rehoused.
That will cost a lot of millions and I expect it will lead to some big changes in housing policy.
According to something in the news, there’s only a few hundred towers in London with the same flammable cladding. Nothing to worry about, carry on…
Every large office building I’ve ever worked in in the UK has staff who are trained and known to everyone as fire wardens. In the event of the fire alarm going off, they ensure that people leave the building, and do a roll call in the assembly area outside. They aren’t full-time fire wardens, but often admin staff who get extra training for this. In addition, the building management itself often has an overall fire safety officer who liaises with the fire crew when they arrive - telling them where the alarms are, and that sort of thing.
It’s a legal requirement for all businesses to have a person identified as a “Responsible Person” to deal with emergencies, and the numbers and types of people required increases with the number of people working in a business. Fire safety legislation for businesses in the UK 2023
Obviously, none of this applies to residential property, but I can assure you, having sat through many cold, wet, dark fire drills or alarms, that commercial properties in the UK do take this very seriously. The risk isn’t one in a million, with (from the link above) 20,000 commercial fires in the UK each year.
In modern US construction (of which Grenfell was neither), the fire tower is of a separate, cinder block “tower-within-a-tower” construction, with heavy fire doors between the floor & the tower. Further, there are blowers that are activated with the alarm to blow air into the tower, overpressurizing it. When opens the door to enter the tower, the overpressurized air is forced out, preventing smoke from entering the tower, because smoke entering a chimney-like fire tower would not be good for people evacuating from the top floors. They have more protection in the fire tower, as well as a means for evacuating.
For modern US buildings this is not exactly true, the fire alarm will sound on every floor but there will be three different messages based on what floor you’re on.
[ul]
[li]Fire floor[/li][li]One floor above/below fire floor[/li][li]Rest of building[/li][/ul]
Where I worked, the fire floor message was to enter the tower (but didn’t say anything about evacuating). Above/below were to stand near the tower (but not enter) while the other floors were “we are investigating this alarm, pay attention for further instructions.”
Are you saying the people on 23 should go onto the 20th floor (as opposed to staying in the fire tower, which I don’t believe is possible as there’s many more people on a floor than can all fit on one flight of stairs)? I have never heard of this, & it would be a huge privacy & security concern in a high rise office building. You do realize that 50 or 100 strangers walking around could see something confidential - account info, legal settlements, etc. & or be able to pocket any manner of portable electronic devices &/or wallets.
Samples of the cladding from over 600 high-rises in London are being sent for testing, with at least three identified as being at risk. Presumably the cladding will be removed from any building in danger.
So not “nothing to worry about, carry on” but instead what sounds like an appropriate response to the danger.
Yes, sarcasm aside - the problem is that replacing the complete exterior of a high-rise is a big and expensive proposition. If most likely these are low-cost or public housing, there’s going to be a sudden urgent need for a lot of money; something the individual landlords and municipalities probably don’t have. It will then fall back to the central government to provide the necessary funds. (Or the landlords will simply evacuate the buildings). Considering that decisions at any level of government move at a snail’s pace, it will be a year or two of negotiation and buck-passing before someone decides how to repair a number of death traps.
Note too, this said “high-rises”. Is a 3-story building less of a death trap if the only stairwell is basically sided in firewood? Presumably someone thought this was perfectly acceptable (i.e. cheap) cladding for any structure.
Yes there had better be. Most state laws require annual fire drills and training of fire wardens. And I believe it is part of the National Fire Code, my certificate has expired. My last certification was 8 years ago. The certification is good for 5 years.
Some cities are very lax on the trained Fire Safety Director (San Jose), that is until something happens then the fines start.
Some cities the first thing that the fire department ask on the annual inspection is for the certification of the Fire Safety Director and the Assistant Fire Safety Director, and the building had better have them.
I work as a stationary engineer and one of the job qualifications is to be in possession of a current certification. And to keep the job engineers are required to keep certified.
Every year the building is required to have classes to train floor wardens and assistant wardens before the annual fire drill. Records of who attended are required to be kept by the building owners. The class is normally around 2 hours.
San Jose does not care if there is a director on staff. But the classes and the fire drill have to be run by Fire Safety Director.
The expense is not that high. A trained employee. And for the tenants 2 hours per year per warden. And a full floor warden may have 0 to 2 assistants per floor. This is not a major expense.
Yes I am because is all the people on 23, 24, &25 just went into the stairwell there would not be room enough. And you want everyone for their safety of the 3 involved floors. With the fire on 24 the fire department is going to use 23 as a staging area and they do not want tenants getting in the way. And 25 is not safe to stay on because fire normally goes up. So 25 can get hot and smoky.
Confidential vs safety? That is why the receiving floor should be notified that stranger can be entering the tenant spaces on the floors below. Few high rises have 50 to 100 people per floor, that would be one crowded floor.
Many of the high rises I’ve been in you can’t get out of the fire tower on many floors; there’s a one-way door into it & there are signs posted that say the nearest exit is x # of floors above/below where you currently are.
Also, I don’t know what kind of offices you’re thinking of but we had 500 people on 4 floors & ⅓ of 14 was the computer room, with various mainframe, UPS, telecom servers & industrial printer(s) rooms, which means only about a dozen people worked in there. Maybe the executive floor is that low, but the general workers in cube farms are going to be higher density in a decent sized building.
First evacuations of towers blocks identified as having dangerous cladding:
It is all moving quite fast.
There are a couple near me in Portsmouth that have been assigned 24 hour fire wardens and are having their cladding removed right now.
I think this is going to turn out to be a widespread problem, indicating more than just localised incompetence.
He (and a lot of others) are focusing on the fact that, in the planning application for the changes to the building, the improved appearance from the nearby conservation area was mentioned. Planning always has to consider views from conservation areas if it affects them - it’s one of the purposes of a conservation area. For example, the one I live in has direct views to the city and those are not allowed to be obstructed by new developments.
The assumption is that the appearance was the main motivating factor. However, the cladding also added insulation and weatherproofing and tbh didn’t look all that much better anyway.
The assumption is also that the conservation area is full of rich people, but I live in a conservation area and I’m in social housing. Looking at the streetview pictures of the Avondale conservation area I’m fairly sure some of it is social housing too, going on the identical doors (not a requirement of a conservation area and one of the surest ways of spotting social housing).
How would any of that apply to a residential building? There were only about 18 residents per floor and a lot were elderly, disabled or children. Two of them are supposed to take on the responsibility of getting their neighbours out? What if they happen not to be home at the time?
A lot went wrong with this building but not obliging its tenants to be fire wardens is not one of them.
There’s another thread in MMPSIMS about this fire - lots of info in there and me being a lot angrier than I am here. Actually I’m still pretty angry but I think we need to focus on what those responsible - the council, the developers and the govts who make the laws re safety regulations - genuinely did wrong. If we criticise them for things which aren’t feasible or are irrelevant then it makes it more likely for the real crimes to be obscured in a fog of wild accusations, allowing the perpetrators to escape.
500 people on 4 floors of a high rise? That is a lot of people.
Yes many of the high rises I have worked in have the stairwell door locked. But when the building goes into alarm it is required that the stairwell doors unlock. If they stayed lock how would the firemen get to the floors to fight the fire?