We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.
Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.
Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.
Wooden construction is very common in America because wood is very common and hence cheap. In this particular region there's another reason for its use: it's right on top of a fault line, and wood-frame residential construction performs very well in an earthquake, while brick or unreinforced masonry tends to crumble.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2011/10/17/will-wright-inspired...
The 911 operator responded "Honey, we only send them one way."
And like a dozen guys showed up.
A fire that can be put out by an extinguisher doesn't stay a fire that can be put out by an extinguisher. The same for suspicious smoldering in a wall.
If you want to deal with a fire in a calm manner yourself, then deal with it yourself, right? When you call the fire department, you've declared that there is a situation bigger than you can handle. It's only reasonable for them to assume it's growing.
The only downside is a few extra truck rolls.
Did it need two additional fire trucks to assist my town? Don’t know. I’m not a professional in that field.
There was even an T apparently assigned to babysit me as I was underdressed when I left the house for mid-Jan.
If there isn't anything else going on, the opportunity cost of sending more people to your thing is very low and the risk that it wasn't actually a small issue can become much larger.
Just because the fire didn't spread doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to, or either you or the firefighters knew if it did or not without the emergency response.
- There is no uncontained combustion on the premises
- There is uncontained combustion on the premises
"small uncontained fire" can become "no fire" on its own, it can stay "small fire" for a matter of hours, or it can become "big fire" in under a minute.
They have no way of knowing: and your description, which I presume is perfectly accurate, can't help them decide. For example, during the one minute you took to make the call, the embers could have caught cellulose insulation on fire, traveling up the outside wall, and beginning to melt vinyl siding. By the time they arrived, the building might be approaching structurally unstable, endangering neighbor properties.
So yes. They show up prepared to tear down walls and cut firebreaks and such. Once a house is 'on fire' time must be assumed to be of the essence.
Just because it didn't go big doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to.
Honestly I am not really upset about that. Train them to support the community in other ways while they hang out waiting for a fire. People are always raging that police cant handle mental health incidents, train them for that (heh I am sure firefighters would not be pumped about that but you get the idea).
(The above numbers are only rough estimates, close enough for discussion, but not even close to right)
I'd rather paramedics for medical problems but they don't have training to deal with all the other things that happen in an emergency so we still need others. And better than paramedics is fast transport to a real emergency room because that will have specialized equipment that won't all fit on a vehicle - which a well trained fire fighter can do.
And maybe that's fair compensation for someone who has been working a job that literally risks his life, but it's not cheap.
There are legitimate critiques of the perverse incentives of defined benefit pensions, but on the whole I'd say it's better to focus on why the overwhelming standard is for people to not be paid well.
(Police unions are indeed a scourge. But similarly, the amount they get paid is like one of the things I am least concerned about)
I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
In the US and Canada where the 2 stairway rule is in use there has been a huge unintended downside of dictating the form of all low-ish and medium rise apartments for decades.
When you need 2 stairs the natural, efficient form is a wide building with a long central corridor with stairs at both ends. Building something that wide generally requires assembling multiple parcels of land and a long, drawn out planning process and large amount of capital investment. Small apartment buildings on a single parcel can't ever pencil out due to the space required to be dedicated to stairs.
Combine in the additional code requirement for bedrooms to have windows (for both quality of life and safety egress) and you get the vast majority of apartments having a limited number of bedrooms with windows only on one side of the living space. 3 and 4 bedroom units that could economically efficiently amortize the high per sq ft cost of kitchens and bathrooms waste an enormous amount of space, so they simply don't get built. Anyone who wants to raise a slightly larger family, live with multiple generations, or split costs with multiple roommates has no apartment options, they are forced to look at high cost, low density urban sprawl.
We currently have prescriptive requirements that dictate things like multiple stairs. We need to switch to outcome driven requirements that require fire suppression and safety over a given period based on occupancy and building size to give firefighters a big safety margin to respond. Then develop those outcomes into tested wall structures with a combination of fire suppression and prevention techniques that developers can adopt. Multiple stairwells might be part of the fire plan for a building, but it also can include things like sprinklers, concrete stairways, and automatic fire doors.
> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.
When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.
Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.
Power outages tend to correlate strongly with situations where the hospital is most needed - bad weather injures a lot of people and takes the power out
And yet, single-engine jets are prohibited from operating under Part 121 and must use Part 135 (the analogy here might be to an apartment building where the developer takes on the responsibility of structural code-compliance and safety, vs. a single-family home where the homeowner does).
There's a big difference in going from 4 to 2 engines, vs going from 2 to 1. And to be certified single engine jets must have battery backups, rapid depressurization tech, and a host of other things twin engines don't have to. In one case (Vision Jet) they use a whole-plane parachute to compensate for the lack of a backup powerplant
There was a regular alarm test, so we knew where to go. Then one day there was a REAL alarm, we all trotted off in our designated directions, but as we came down that back stairwell, it was full of smoke (not thick, but clearly something going on...) then at the bottom we saw why: TGIF had been stacking cardboard waste in there, plus their employees had been taking cigarette breaks in there, beside the no smoking sign... and you'll never guess what happened. Yep, fire in the fire escape.
The fire marshall was getting very stabby pointy fingering at some sheepish looking people as we went by to our muster points.
(it was just a stack of cardboard and there was nothing else flammable in the stairwell, it wasn't life threatening, just reckless)
It is a common misconception that the job of firefighters is just to put out fires. They have long been a jack-of-all-trades profession. It has long been normal around the world for firefighters to also do rescue, inspections, hazmat operations, etc. 'Rescue' itself is a very broad and commonly needed function, which may be more common than actually putting out fire these days.
Even if they can't handle it, they know who to call and how to report it. An EMS is going to be far less capable of identifying many kinds of chemically hazardous situations. Police officers are more of a mixed bag and typically do the "lets push people away from here to be safe so someone can identify the problem".
Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.
(unless I Completely misunderstood)
> One of the first technical considerations of the modern fire escape was carried out by the Franklin Institute in 1881 after the Randolph Street mill fire in Philadelphia trapped 35 people inside. Their conclusion was that external egress paths, in other words, the bolt-on fire escapes had, quote, “comparatively little value.” They recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations, but that internal stairways, properly constructed, afforded the best means of escape.
I took "The recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations" as a much less general statement than
> External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago
I've seen all these things happen, even though I live in EU country with strict regulations. I sure sleep better knowing that my apartment has entrance directly to outdoor corridor, and a ladder I can climb down from my balcony if the corridor is somehow blocked. I would never move into a modern apartment building where only escape is through indoor corridors.
I think this is much to broad.
Even the film does not suggest eliminating multiple exits; rather, it points out that it took a long time to replace external fire escapes with better alternatives. Specifically, internal, fireproof staircases that offer greater protection and are used regularly and therefore familiar to those fleeing.
When the redundancy is gone (not available, blocked, insufficient spaced) this can quickly lead to a disaster. Here are some recent examples
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Crans-Montana_bar_fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_nightclub_fire
[3] https://gpe.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Johannesburg_building_fi...
There are a few reasons for this, and none of them are that the firefighters are bored.
The first reason, probably more relevant in Ontario, is just a matter of practicality. If an injury is reported in an accident, the assumption is that a person needs medical attention. Emergency services can't really make an assessment of a scene without being on site, so both are sent in case there needs to be some kind of fire suppression or an extraction to reach the person. Simply, we don't want an ambulance to arrive at an accident, realize on-site that the jaws of life are needed before they can help, wait for another response time, and then render care. The potential to save a life takes precedence over raw efficiency.
(A quick side note about assessing a scene: if you're just driving by, it's basically impossible to tell how bad an injury might be in an accident. Modern cars are very safe, but if someone wasn't wearing their seatbelt and had their head in the wrong place when an airbag went off, even a fender bender can be a life-threatening situation.)
The second, at least in the US, is that ambulances are not considered essential emergency services in many communities[0]. This means that they don't get the same level of funding and are not subject to the same response time requirements as the fire department. Emergency medical services might be covered by a hodgepodge of private companies and volunteer efforts[1], so this also means that public services, such as the fire department, often have to fill in the gaps. Especially in rural areas, ample ambulance coverage just isn't profitable to the private companies that operate the service, so response times can be close to half an hour.
[0] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/06/26/no-amb...
[1] - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/08/the-problem-of-p...
EVs can cause pretty bad fires from benign looking accidents. Perhaps this is for the best? Better safe than sorry as they say.
Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.
When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.
The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.
The problem is you need a good number when there is a serious fire, even if it doesn't happen very often.
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
That's how it is in NYC[0] too...
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nyc-council-and-fdny-po...
Which is to say the small cheaper car only makes sense after you have enough large ones and conclude you still need more cars.
If the two needs are distributed such that it works well to have one group of full-time workers able to do both, then I reckon that’s fine.
carrying grandma out of a burning building and carrying her downstairs after a fall are the same skill sets
Please, let's hear your ideas. (blows away in the wind)
Also, firefighters need to know how to dismantle a house quickly to support their operations. So if the door needs to come off the hinges to get grandma down the stairs, firefighters will be prepared for that and have it done in 30 seconds
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
OMG so many people died, we need to spare no expense in insuring this doesn't happen again.
[time passes]
OMG these emergency services are so expensive, why do we even have them.
[budget cuts, size cuts, personnel cuts, cuts cuts cuts]
OMG, I'm on fire, everything is on fire, why did the state do this to me, we need to spare no expense in insuring this never happens again.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
Yeah. That makes sense a lot of the time. It also makes sense to reduce capacity when the need lessens while still maintaining adequate slack.
> Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
If they need to do that, it's not because of the public. It's probably because they got a "challenge" from some clever idiot with a business or economics degree.
Also, people typically want something valuable to do, so they go find it. That's not something the proponents of our coming AI utopia seem to understand.
Keeping firefighters from being bored is why you see them playing pickleball or other sporty things around the firehouse. If your firefighters are that bored, you should look at having the chief replaced with someone better trained. Especially for the city the size of Ontario.
Their work 8 hours which is a mix of physical fitness training (carefully designed to keep them in shape without being too wore out to respond if something does happen as they finish training) and training. They have a lot of time to learn about all the latest medical emergency treatments, the latest in fire fighting. They get constant CPR refreshers because even though they are often first on the scene when CPR is needed it still doesn't happen often enough to remember.
The other 16 hours - 8 of them are sleeping. the other 8 are theirs to do whatever. Any good firehouse will keep plenty of games (TV, board games, pickelball...) so that they are not bored.
I better go show up to metaphorical fender benders more
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
Most of the land in the US doesn't have enough population to support a large chemical plant. The plant needs not only the people who work in the plant. It also needs schools, grocery stores, libraries, doctors... And that many people also really want things like sports teams. A small chemical plant can locate in a rural areas, but not a large one.
I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.
Thirty years ago (in USA) that's already how it was done where I lived.
Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?
Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.
What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).
Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.
They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.
Yes, regulation that increased the proliferation of known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in our households and pressed up against our spouses and children's skin and orifices.
Maybe I'll take the wrought iron fire escape.
With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
But I saw a retrospective documentary on the WTC collapse, in which the star witness named people who only survived the second tower because they found a way to cross to the intact fire escape after the second plane hit right into one of them.
I’m not sure what the answer is, but I suspect perhaps if the building is too tall for a ladder truck to reach you, then the building should provide that redundancy instead.
I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.
What you need is a path out when there is a large fire. Both exits and fire extinguishers are part of that. Everything else is a nice to have (sometimes very nice), but you still have to prepare for when everything else fails.
No one told me in either of my apartments.
Me? I'd certainly prefer that didn't happen.
Which is why I'm glad I have a fire escape. Should there be a fire that either blocks access to the main stairwell and/or my front door, there's an additional egress point at the other end of my apartment.
I'd much prefer that there wasn't a fire at all, but I'd much rather have multiple egress points for me and my animals than having to sit and wait to die of smoke inhalation if a serious fire were to rip through my (more than a century old) apartment building.
The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.
If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.
It's tradeoffs all the way down!
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...
Are the two elevators a code requirement as well?
See also: The Newby–McMahon Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_littlest_skyscraper Where they sort of want to use the upper floors. but it can barely fit one staircase, two would take up the entire floor, a building code quandary.
US apartments look ugly because the IBC has been picked over by every flavor of money grubbing business interests masquerading as concerned do gooders. Once you filter out all the options rendered financially noncompetitive by each of their bought and paid for rules there's only a few paths to a viable building. You might have a dozen megacorps buying windows from a dozen suppliers but those dozen times dozen theoretical options are the same thing in practice because that's what it takes to hit Leed Platinum (TM) or whatever.
Seriously. Go watch some 80s/90s movies that were set in the then present day. Those cube farms have more diversity of style and material than anything today.
In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.
I hate that mistake with a passion.
... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.
> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.
Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.
You're contrasting rules for new construction with rules for existing buildings during renovation.
It's difficult and often impractical to retrofit a protected stairway into an existing building, but it's not a major hardship to include in new construction (although requirements can substantially change layouts)
Perhaps a comparison to the current breaker requirements in the electrical code and other "industry excess" shall we say, in the IBC is in order.
But Grady isn't gonna make that comparison because when a man's salary depends on not understanding something he won't understand it.
Building code is a very, very, very dirty sausage factory and dirty factories produce a lot more "oops we were doing it in a way we knew was wrong for 50yr" outcomes than the clean ones. It's a disservice to everybody to just hand wave that all away at a dozen points like is done here.
I've got my own qualms about AFCIs, but I'm still going to install/use them in my own house. The only thing that could move that needle would be if they're actively harmful. Like I'm certainly not putting GFCI on the sump pump circuit.
Likewise you can't honestly write an article about what's arguably a boondoggled peddled at great expense by fire code without at least touching upon the topic of financial iterest.
I'm putting GFCIs in everywhere before I put put AFCIs anywhere. Maybe that's just because I'm too poor for brushless everything though.
Regardless, I only mention them because they're a texbook example of a code inclusion that's "sus" in all the same ways fire escapes were then and obviously are now.
Engineering is about the technicals, which includes safety codes, despite their contents having been created through the social processes of codification. It's an engineer's job to follow those codes, for better and for worse. On the whole I would say that is for the better, despite any corruption inherent to human processes.
I don't see how fire escapes were suspect in the context of buildings that were built around a single central open stairway. A second retrofitted external stairway is an obvious solution, using an exciting material of the time (steel).
I do suspect what we're missing from the article is a real sense of the time it took to make the transition away from this building design towards multiple distributed closed-door stairways with noncombustible finishes, including the elevators that make such designs palatable.
I could be wrong here, of course. But I'm not going to do a deep research dive to figure this out for myself, I'm content with the default answer of assuming the codes are mostly reasonable. Which is the same tack the author took. If you want to make a constructive point otherwise, you're going to have to do that work yourself.
So we should all just bend over and take it quietly when the requirements are not just stupid but stupid for bad reasons? Everyone saying "welp, not my money, I get paid either way, gonna keep my mouth shut" is the problem.
>I do suspect what we're missing from the article is a real sense of the time it took to make the transition away from this building design towards multiple distributed closed-door stairways with noncombustible finishes, including the elevators that make such designs palatable.
About 50yr. So for ~50yr they were GTG for new construction