History suggests that the primary ingress/egress points are the only ones worth considering. Emergency doors have a nagging tendency to be obstructed, hidden, barricaded or even flat-out locked even when they're not allowed to be. And that's assuming people will know where they are. When they're half-drunk, half-stoned, half-asleep, and wandering around in a smoke filled corridor at 2:00 am.
> Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows.
> Various historians have also ascribed the exit doors being locked to management's wanting to keep out union organizers due to management's anti-union bias. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route.
> Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape – which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase
> The toxic smoke, heat, and the resulting human rush toward the main exit killed 100; 230 were injured and another 132 escaped uninjured.
> By this time, the nightclub's fire alarm had activated, and although there were four possible exits, most people headed for the front door through which they had entered. The ensuing crowd crush in the narrow hallway leading to that exit quickly blocked the exit completely and resulted in numerous deaths and injuries among the patrons and staff.
> Twenty-five workers were killed and 55 injured in the fire, trapped behind locked fire doors.
> The majority of those who escaped unharmed were workers in the front of the building who left through the unlocked main entrance,
It seems clear that two entrances/exists are not enough, even if there is numerous of extra emergency exists. People will, in panic, return to the point they came from, even if emergency exists are highlighted.
"Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time..."
Your quote is from a fire in 1911. This is no longer at all common practice, and would get the university in serious trouble during regular inspections.
Yes, the quotes are all from the linked articles, one of the event happened in 1911. It's not unheard of that schools also disconnect fire alarms and block fire escapes because students "abuse" those from time to time.
So yeah, maybe one of the quotes is less strong, but the sentiment still stands, that fire exists are not a replacement for main exists, as people tend to go back to where they came from, instead of seeking new exists.
2019 - a set of building exit doors with panic bars for egress gets locked closed at work presumably because those using them were letting in too much cold outside air in the depth of winter.
Reported the "locked" status to the local fire inspector, the panic bars were unlocked the next day.
So it is not just in 1911 that folks with the key to the lock get the bright idea to lock a door that is meant to serve as an emergency exit in the event of a fire or other emergency.
I'm sure all egress doors would have crash bars. Think of any tall building, they typically only have one or two major entrances but then many one way egress doors. This building wouldn't be any different.
Most US downtown skyscrapers generally have the one main entrance and then a fair amount of secondary stairwell exits as well. Some of those are even residential buildings.
Indeed. The "devil is in the details" though. You can "get away with", for example, fewer entrances/exits if you compensate by requiring fire proof construction, sprinklers & standpipes, fire rated interior partition doors, etc.
We don't know yet how many (if any) of those things will apply to Munger Hall. I have reached out to SBFire to ask some of these questions, and hope to hear back from them.
Dormitories typically have a terrible problem with their one-way doors getting mysteriously blocked. In my college dorm, they were chained shut. This was to prevent people from opening up an egress door from the inside and getting alcohol from the people on the outside. Also the hatch on the top of the elevators was nailed shut.
Oh that sounds so great. I walk out the door to class, realize I forgot a pen, then get to take a 15 minute walk all the around the building just to get back up to my room. Wonderful
I don't think either of us is qualified to express fire-safety-analysis statements with absolute certainty, but I would think the prior likelihood would be very small that plans would be drawn up with glaring fire-code violations, or that fire code would be written to allow the possibility for dangerous queueing hazards.
