15 ms·

From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this: A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: dea

From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this: A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: deathtrap. Building this is setting UCSB up to be the site of the next Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], Station Nightclub fire[2], or Hamlet Chicken Processing Plant fire[3]. At a first glance, based only on the information provided in the article, I'd say that there is basically NOTHING good about this idea. But I'll allow that there are other details that could change the dynamic. Still, the weight of history suggests the importance of taking a somewhat skeptical position towards any measure of hand-waving when it comes to fire safety. At the moment, color me skeptical. Edit: Let me add this... the linked article doesn't go into any real details about the fire safety aspects of this, so there's a lot of info we don't have without digging into other sources. One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories and this building is properly sprinklered, that would assuage some of my concerns, as a working sprinkler system is basically the single most important thing you can have to save lives in the event of a fire.[4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plan... [4]: https://nfsa.org/2020/12/15/sprinkler-saves-proof-that-fire-sprinklers-save-people-and-property/ https://nfsa.org/2020/12/15/sprinkler-saves-proof-that-fire-...

giarc 5y ago
As point out elsewhere, 2 entrances doesn't mean 2 egress points. There are likely lots of one way doors out of the building.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  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.
  - giarc 5y ago
    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.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Indeed. From the linked articles above: > 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.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      "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.
- k8si 5y ago
  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
  - EForEndeavour 5y ago
    A fringe benefit of the design is that it applies behavioural and evolutionary pressure against forgetfulness and other cognitive flaws.
    - KittenInABox 5y ago
      Evolutionary pressure, what? This isn't a situation where people who just happen to forget a pen one day deserve to not breed.
    - queuebert 5y ago
      Such as free will.
- raldi 5y ago
  I count ten emergency stairwells on every floor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
  - MR4D 5y ago
    That's 450 people per stairwell. Assuming 20 people per floor, it would be packed with lines extending out into the floors.
    - raldi 5y ago
      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.
    - badwolf 5y ago
      Is this really any different than any highrise, that nobody seems to have this very pressing concern over?
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  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.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're aware of.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're aware of. Signage, lighting, and periodic drill requirements exist (among other reasons) so that people will be aware of emergency exits.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      You didn't contradict a single thing I said. Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > You didn't contradict a single thing I said. Not every response is intended to be an argument. > Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them. Every public entity I’ve been involved with enough to know how they address them has, private entities are more varied.
        MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        Every public entity I've ever encountered past high school has failed miserably at getting even 30% participation in fire drills.
maxcan 5y ago
Its exceedingly likely that that number does not include fire escapes and emergency exits.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  Maybe so. This article elides a lot of details... in fact, they don't touch on fire safety aspects at all as far as I can tell. So maybe there are sufficient accommodations made in terms of fire safety. It's hard to say. But... if the design really was done by an amateur architect who probably has little or no background specifically related to fire/life safety issues vis-a-vis building design, and it truly hasn't been modified from his design... I don't know. I'll just say "color me skeptical" for now. If I'm ultimately proven wrong, then I would actually be very happy. I'd much rather suffer the indignity of having to admit I was wrong about something on HN, than watch a news report detailing hundreds of student deaths on campus.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test. My alma mater had to go back and redo a building based on fire marshal concerns.
    - mindcrime 5y ago
      Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test. I would hope not. The article describes this as a "proposal" and I'm not sure how far along they are with it. Maybe they haven't even gotten as far as submitting a design for fire safety inspection yet. Or maybe they have, got feedback, and made adjustments in response, and the article above glossed over that. It's hard to say based only on what we know from TFA at the moment.
mnd999 5y ago
Would it even pass fire regs? Surely that makes it a non-starter?
- mindcrime 5y ago
  It's hard to imagine how it would, but fire regulations vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The article doesn't go into whether or not there has been any review of the plans from that perspective, so it's hard to say.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-26-re-12733-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-26-re-12733... That's by way of a reddit post about the dorm that I stumbled across trying to find the answer to whether there were fire code concerns with the project.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Hard to understand how the new dorm meets these standards, though the article is from 2000, and the question was about a private home: To begin with, the Unified Building Code states that every bedroom is required to have at least one window opening to the exterior of the dwelling, not an adjoining room. The purpose of this requirement is threefold: A bedroom must have a direct source of outside light, provided by a window that is at least 10% as large as the floor area of the room. * A bedroom must have a direct source of outside ventilation, consisting of an opening window at least 5% as large as the floor area. * Every bedroom must have a means of fire escape, directly to the exterior of the building, by way of a door or window that opens. Fire escapes to adjoining rooms are not acceptable. In the advent of a fire, that second room could conceivably be filled with smoke or engulfed in flames at the moment when escape becomes imperative. The only permitted means of escape is to the outside.*
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Those are factories, so it's a bit different, but I agree with you. In my state every room in a home that could be used as a bedroom or for regular occupancy (ie not a closet) has to have a window large enough to get a person out. For damn good reason. How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code? I don't even understand how this was seriously considered in the first place. Apparently the project has a $1.5B pricetag and this old coot is tossing in a seventh of that? WTF.
- queuebert 5y ago
  I was unable to get home owner's insurance for my home until I removed the existing burglar bars on the windows.
- wpietri 5y ago
  > How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code? UCSB employs 10k people in a town of 90k. This is a $1.5 billion project that the University is desperate to have. It seems totally plausible to me that they could find a compliant inspector and/or get a variance for the building. Whether or not it's actually safe, you can bet that the companies making millions off this will have a plausible story about safety. With lots of documents and presentations and software models. What's a small-town fire safety inspector got to put against that?
ajross 5y ago
Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation design. There are clearly aesthetic complaints many people will have here, but realistically safety shouldn't be a problem. This is simply not a "large" building by skyscraper standards, and those can be built safely. Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah, no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall". I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached garage owners tend to remember.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall". No better way to get kids prepared for what comes ahead in their adulthood, huh?
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Preparing/conditioning today's young adults for the dystopian future, where all our jobs are being done by robots, and the elite class needs to warehouse the rest of us safely away in 2mx2m cells in gigantic concrete honeycomb dormitories, where we're given a TV and one Soma per day.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      You won't have any possessions, and you will like it.
    - superkuh 5y ago
      If anyone is interested, this is basically the first half of the speculative fiction story, "Mana" (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) which has been posted here on HN a few times.
aaron695 5y ago
$200 million+ and no one raised fire safety because they hadn't read Wikipedia? The are far more that 'two entrances' on the plans. What are you talking about? What plans are you analysing? I count 12 not including things like the laundry and lobby exits, which are also inter-linked. What's wrong with HN. This is a really interesting project. Tech is getting very cool for dense living. And we know dense communities increases innovation and is the most environmental thing you can do. Anyone who's dealt with architects know they are the absolute worst. It's all about looks not usability. The widows is controversial, but that's the point. A system that works without windows changes the game. And university students are not old HN people who want to live their entire day in a room.
nradov 5y ago
Yes the local building code has required sprinklers for some years now.
mindcrime 5y ago
FWIW, I am intrigued enough by this that I decided to reach out to SBFD and inquire as to their position (if any) on this proposal. I just sent the following email to several of their fire prevention / inspections / public info people. If/when I hear back, I'll update you all. Or heck, maybe one of them will sign up for an HN account and post something. That would be interesting. ---- > SBFire: > Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. I > stumbled across an article about the proposed UCSB "Munger > Hall" on an Internet forum that I frequent. > https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-protest-over-ucsb-mega-dorm/ https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-... > As a former firefighter myself, I got some serious bad > vibes from the way this building was described. I made a > comment about my concerns which sparked (no pun intended) > a lot of discussion about fire safety, building codes, > etc. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356 > As it happens, the original article was somewhat light on > details about the fire safety aspects of the building. So > I wanted to reach out to you and simply ask "From an SB > Fire perspective, has this building design been reviewed, > and - if so - are there any outstanding concerns from a > fire/life safety viewpoint?" > I'm particularly interested in knowing if there are any > concerns around the number of entrances / egress points, > the proposal for interior bedrooms with no windows, and > whether or not this structure would be sprinklered. > Thank you kindly!
- coding123 5y ago
  I'm not the guy you contacted, but I've had my head down in Title 24 crap for months, but here's the egress requirements in CA: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means-of-egress https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means... Read the section on "[BE] 1004.2Cumulative occupant loads."
raldi 5y ago
In addition to the two entrances, there are ten emergency exit stairwells on every floor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
- paganel 5y ago
  This Munger guy shouldn't design buildings, he should have sticked with making money out of bull-riding the stock-market.
  - prewett 5y ago
    Given that he is donating $200 million towards its construction, presumably he spent a substantial amount of money on getting qualified people to design it. It's not like he's short on money.
    - paganel 5y ago
      The article mentions that he was directly responsible for it: > his blueprints be followed exactly. No sane architect would have come up with this abomination, hence why the sane architect who is the main subject of this article has just resigned.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this: > A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances. The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of additional first-floor exit doors. > One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.) If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the argument “this building will either get everyone killed in a fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code requirements”, they probably would have led with that rather than fuzzy social and psychological concerns. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-joE000/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-j...
- xg15 5y ago
  Figure 6 shows the floor plan (or see [1]) Even with emergency exits, there are a lot of interior areas that will quickly be blocked off from any exit if a fire breaks out in the wrong place. The whole interior are will also fill with smoke really quickly. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/spokanerising/status/1453927747277840388 https://mobile.twitter.com/spokanerising/status/145392774727...
- mindcrime 5y ago
  I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances. Yes, I've already addressed that point multiple times in this discussion. Emergency exits are a factor, but not a be-all / end-all. State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.) Thanks for sharing. I'm not a California resident, so I'm less familiar with the particulars of their regulations out there.
sjg007 5y ago
It will have sprinklers that’s the code now.
bagels 5y ago
My first reaction was the terrible danger this design presents as well. Doesn't code require each room to have two means of egress? Usually the second one is a window.
mcint 5y ago
Many if not all UC campuses need only respect state regulations. City and County building codes need not apply, and fire codes, hopefully would, but University administrators have room to push that. Land grant universities!
AlbertCory 5y ago
A lot of charming naïveté here along the lines of "surely the city has fire regulations, and surely the building will be reviewed for those!" You forget the power of money. I live near the Apple Spaceship, where they have the city of Cupertino completely cowed and afraid to even ask a question about their stupid plans. An entire useful east-west artery (Pruneridge) was permanently taken out of service for that. It's so cute when you assume that Santa Barbara is going to say No to this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bhickey 5y ago
The problem with the Station wasn't the lack of egress, it was the lack of identified egress, a choke point at the main entrance which triggered a crowd collapse, pyrotecnics and combustible foam.
NewJazz 5y ago
A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: deathtrap. For more than just reasons if fire in my opinion. I'm surprised nobody has said the word gun yet. Are they going to be scanning people and checking their backpacks art he door? That sure would make it feel more like a prison.
- slownews45 5y ago
  You are not a student at this school. Where I went to school we got lots of strong opinions from outsiders. But some of the "worst" dorms were the most popular for reasons that are not always obvious to outsiders. And yes, some students like to live close to others. UCSB may be doing double and triple bunking in rooms (my school did 4 to a room for a while, when the "crappy" new space opened it was first choice in the housing lottery). Folks talking about sharing a bathroom meaning that people will be pooping out of windows are idiots who either went to some elite school where you are waited on by butlers. It would not be uncommon for a hall with 15 rooms to have two bathrooms. Other things that offended folks that students gave no craps about. We had some coed bathrooms, was never an issue. I'm sure now they are called gender neutral.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    What does any of this have to do with gun safety?
    - slownews45 5y ago
      What does a building with 10 emergency exists, lots of individually lockable suites and rooms have to do with guns? Santa Barbara has strict anti-gun laws already. CA has a lot of anti-gun laws already. The UCSB system has anti gun laws already. Santa Barbara issues something like 50 permits a DECADE for concealed carry. It's a "may" issue jurisdiction, and they don't issue. And if metal detectors are implemented, I'm not sure students will care. They already exist for large sporting events and other areas of concern, so if there was a concern you'd want fewer main entrances so you could staff them. Bigger issue is normally non-students in student housing, so security can be good in terms of setup. This means the newer buildings often do things like keycard access to suites only for suite holders, and some even do keycards for your room separate from suite, again, all logged and tracked. I visited a friend at a school where I had to sign in my car with a guard, had to be escorted to their room by a front desk staffer etc. That's extreme - no way UC is going that (this was a small elite place). The major student issues in terms of safety are stranger access to dorms / bathrooms at night, theft issues (bikes / bags etc), and nuisance issues (noise, weed smoke, parties etc).
mindcrime 5y ago
As promised, here is the response I received from Santa Barbara County FD: Thanks for reaching out to us. While the Munger Hall is not our review responsibility, we are working very closely with the UCSB Fire Marshal in his review. We have a great working relationship with the Fire Marshal. We have had numerous meetings on this project and the Fire Marshal is open and willing to suggestions when it come to fire and life safety issues. We will continue to meet on this project and it is our hope that all fire and life safety issues will be addressed. I am available if you have any further questions or concern. You can also reach out the University Fire Marshal. So, not a lot of detail (I expected that) but it is interesting that they do seem to allude to there indeed being fire safety issues which need to be addressed.

giarc 5y ago

As point out elsewhere, 2 entrances doesn't mean 2 egress points. There are likely lots of one way doors out of the building.

mindcrime 5y ago
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.
- giarc 5y ago
  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.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Indeed. From the linked articles above: > 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.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    "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.
k8si 5y ago
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
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
  A fringe benefit of the design is that it applies behavioural and evolutionary pressure against forgetfulness and other cognitive flaws.
  - KittenInABox 5y ago
    Evolutionary pressure, what? This isn't a situation where people who just happen to forget a pen one day deserve to not breed.
  - queuebert 5y ago
    Such as free will.
raldi 5y ago
I count ten emergency stairwells on every floor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
- MR4D 5y ago
  That's 450 people per stairwell. Assuming 20 people per floor, it would be packed with lines extending out into the floors.
  - raldi 5y ago
    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.
  - badwolf 5y ago
    Is this really any different than any highrise, that nobody seems to have this very pressing concern over?
at_a_remove 5y ago
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.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're aware of.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're aware of. Signage, lighting, and periodic drill requirements exist (among other reasons) so that people will be aware of emergency exits.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    You didn't contradict a single thing I said. Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > You didn't contradict a single thing I said. Not every response is intended to be an argument. > Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody pays any attention to them. Every public entity I’ve been involved with enough to know how they address them has, private entities are more varied.
      - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        Every public entity I've ever encountered past high school has failed miserably at getting even 30% participation in fire drills.

maxcan 5y ago

Its exceedingly likely that that number does not include fire escapes and emergency exits.

mindcrime 5y ago
Maybe so. This article elides a lot of details... in fact, they don't touch on fire safety aspects at all as far as I can tell. So maybe there are sufficient accommodations made in terms of fire safety. It's hard to say. But... if the design really was done by an amateur architect who probably has little or no background specifically related to fire/life safety issues vis-a-vis building design, and it truly hasn't been modified from his design... I don't know. I'll just say "color me skeptical" for now. If I'm ultimately proven wrong, then I would actually be very happy. I'd much rather suffer the indignity of having to admit I was wrong about something on HN, than watch a news report detailing hundreds of student deaths on campus.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test. My alma mater had to go back and redo a building based on fire marshal concerns.
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test. I would hope not. The article describes this as a "proposal" and I'm not sure how far along they are with it. Maybe they haven't even gotten as far as submitting a design for fire safety inspection yet. Or maybe they have, got feedback, and made adjustments in response, and the article above glossed over that. It's hard to say based only on what we know from TFA at the moment.

mnd999 5y ago

Would it even pass fire regs? Surely that makes it a non-starter?

mindcrime 5y ago
It's hard to imagine how it would, but fire regulations vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The article doesn't go into whether or not there has been any review of the plans from that perspective, so it's hard to say.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-26-re-12733-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-26-re-12733... That's by way of a reddit post about the dorm that I stumbled across trying to find the answer to whether there were fire code concerns with the project.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Hard to understand how the new dorm meets these standards, though the article is from 2000, and the question was about a private home: To begin with, the Unified Building Code states that every bedroom is required to have at least one window opening to the exterior of the dwelling, not an adjoining room. The purpose of this requirement is threefold: A bedroom must have a direct source of outside light, provided by a window that is at least 10% as large as the floor area of the room. * A bedroom must have a direct source of outside ventilation, consisting of an opening window at least 5% as large as the floor area. * Every bedroom must have a means of fire escape, directly to the exterior of the building, by way of a door or window that opens. Fire escapes to adjoining rooms are not acceptable. In the advent of a fire, that second room could conceivably be filled with smoke or engulfed in flames at the moment when escape becomes imperative. The only permitted means of escape is to the outside.*

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Those are factories, so it's a bit different, but I agree with you. In my state every room in a home that could be used as a bedroom or for regular occupancy (ie not a closet) has to have a window large enough to get a person out. For damn good reason. How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code? I don't even understand how this was seriously considered in the first place. Apparently the project has a $1.5B pricetag and this old coot is tossing in a seventh of that? WTF.

queuebert 5y ago
I was unable to get home owner's insurance for my home until I removed the existing burglar bars on the windows.
wpietri 5y ago
> How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code? UCSB employs 10k people in a town of 90k. This is a $1.5 billion project that the University is desperate to have. It seems totally plausible to me that they could find a compliant inspector and/or get a variance for the building. Whether or not it's actually safe, you can bet that the companies making millions off this will have a plausible story about safety. With lots of documents and presentations and software models. What's a small-town fire safety inspector got to put against that?

ajross 5y ago

Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation design. There are clearly aesthetic complaints many people will have here, but realistically safety shouldn't be a problem. This is simply not a "large" building by skyscraper standards, and those can be built safely. Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah, no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall". I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached garage owners tend to remember.

rglullis 5y ago
> These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall". No better way to get kids prepared for what comes ahead in their adulthood, huh?
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Preparing/conditioning today's young adults for the dystopian future, where all our jobs are being done by robots, and the elite class needs to warehouse the rest of us safely away in 2mx2m cells in gigantic concrete honeycomb dormitories, where we're given a TV and one Soma per day.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    You won't have any possessions, and you will like it.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    If anyone is interested, this is basically the first half of the speculative fiction story, "Mana" (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) which has been posted here on HN a few times.

aaron695 5y ago

$200 million+ and no one raised fire safety because they hadn't read Wikipedia? The are far more that 'two entrances' on the plans. What are you talking about? What plans are you analysing? I count 12 not including things like the laundry and lobby exits, which are also inter-linked. What's wrong with HN. This is a really interesting project. Tech is getting very cool for dense living. And we know dense communities increases innovation and is the most environmental thing you can do. Anyone who's dealt with architects know they are the absolute worst. It's all about looks not usability. The widows is controversial, but that's the point. A system that works without windows changes the game. And university students are not old HN people who want to live their entire day in a room.

nradov 5y ago

Yes the local building code has required sprinklers for some years now.

mindcrime 5y ago

FWIW, I am intrigued enough by this that I decided to reach out to SBFD and inquire as to their position (if any) on this proposal. I just sent the following email to several of their fire prevention / inspections / public info people. If/when I hear back, I'll update you all. Or heck, maybe one of them will sign up for an HN account and post something. That would be interesting. ---- > SBFire: > Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. I > stumbled across an article about the proposed UCSB "Munger > Hall" on an Internet forum that I frequent. > https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-protest-over-ucsb-mega-dorm/ https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-in-... > As a former firefighter myself, I got some serious bad > vibes from the way this building was described. I made a > comment about my concerns which sparked (no pun intended) > a lot of discussion about fire safety, building codes, > etc. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356 > As it happens, the original article was somewhat light on > details about the fire safety aspects of the building. So > I wanted to reach out to you and simply ask "From an SB > Fire perspective, has this building design been reviewed, > and - if so - are there any outstanding concerns from a > fire/life safety viewpoint?" > I'm particularly interested in knowing if there are any > concerns around the number of entrances / egress points, > the proposal for interior bedrooms with no windows, and > whether or not this structure would be sprinklered. > Thank you kindly!

coding123 5y ago
I'm not the guy you contacted, but I've had my head down in Title 24 crap for months, but here's the egress requirements in CA: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means-of-egress https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means... Read the section on "[BE] 1004.2Cumulative occupant loads."

raldi 5y ago

In addition to the two entrances, there are ten emergency exit stairwells on every floor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg

paganel 5y ago
This Munger guy shouldn't design buildings, he should have sticked with making money out of bull-riding the stock-market.
- prewett 5y ago
  Given that he is donating $200 million towards its construction, presumably he spent a substantial amount of money on getting qualified people to design it. It's not like he's short on money.
  - paganel 5y ago
    The article mentions that he was directly responsible for it: > his blueprints be followed exactly. No sane architect would have come up with this abomination, hence why the sane architect who is the main subject of this article has just resigned.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this: > A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances. The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of additional first-floor exit doors. > One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.) If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the argument “this building will either get everyone killed in a fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code requirements”, they probably would have led with that rather than fuzzy social and psychological concerns. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-joE000/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-j...

xg15 5y ago
Figure 6 shows the floor plan (or see [1]) Even with emergency exits, there are a lot of interior areas that will quickly be blocked off from any exit if a fire breaks out in the wrong place. The whole interior are will also fill with smoke really quickly. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/spokanerising/status/1453927747277840388 https://mobile.twitter.com/spokanerising/status/145392774727...
mindcrime 5y ago
I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances. Yes, I've already addressed that point multiple times in this discussion. Emergency exits are a factor, but not a be-all / end-all. State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.) Thanks for sharing. I'm not a California resident, so I'm less familiar with the particulars of their regulations out there.

sjg007 5y ago

It will have sprinklers that’s the code now.

bagels 5y ago

My first reaction was the terrible danger this design presents as well. Doesn't code require each room to have two means of egress? Usually the second one is a window.

mcint 5y ago

Many if not all UC campuses need only respect state regulations. City and County building codes need not apply, and fire codes, hopefully would, but University administrators have room to push that. Land grant universities!

AlbertCory 5y ago

A lot of charming naïveté here along the lines of "surely the city has fire regulations, and surely the building will be reviewed for those!" You forget the power of money. I live near the Apple Spaceship, where they have the city of Cupertino completely cowed and afraid to even ask a question about their stupid plans. An entire useful east-west artery (Pruneridge) was permanently taken out of service for that. It's so cute when you assume that Santa Barbara is going to say No to this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bhickey 5y ago

The problem with the Station wasn't the lack of egress, it was the lack of identified egress, a choke point at the main entrance which triggered a crowd collapse, pyrotecnics and combustible foam.

NewJazz 5y ago

A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: deathtrap. For more than just reasons if fire in my opinion. I'm surprised nobody has said the word gun yet. Are they going to be scanning people and checking their backpacks art he door? That sure would make it feel more like a prison.

slownews45 5y ago
You are not a student at this school. Where I went to school we got lots of strong opinions from outsiders. But some of the "worst" dorms were the most popular for reasons that are not always obvious to outsiders. And yes, some students like to live close to others. UCSB may be doing double and triple bunking in rooms (my school did 4 to a room for a while, when the "crappy" new space opened it was first choice in the housing lottery). Folks talking about sharing a bathroom meaning that people will be pooping out of windows are idiots who either went to some elite school where you are waited on by butlers. It would not be uncommon for a hall with 15 rooms to have two bathrooms. Other things that offended folks that students gave no craps about. We had some coed bathrooms, was never an issue. I'm sure now they are called gender neutral.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  What does any of this have to do with gun safety?
  - slownews45 5y ago
    What does a building with 10 emergency exists, lots of individually lockable suites and rooms have to do with guns? Santa Barbara has strict anti-gun laws already. CA has a lot of anti-gun laws already. The UCSB system has anti gun laws already. Santa Barbara issues something like 50 permits a DECADE for concealed carry. It's a "may" issue jurisdiction, and they don't issue. And if metal detectors are implemented, I'm not sure students will care. They already exist for large sporting events and other areas of concern, so if there was a concern you'd want fewer main entrances so you could staff them. Bigger issue is normally non-students in student housing, so security can be good in terms of setup. This means the newer buildings often do things like keycard access to suites only for suite holders, and some even do keycards for your room separate from suite, again, all logged and tracked. I visited a friend at a school where I had to sign in my car with a guard, had to be escorted to their room by a front desk staffer etc. That's extreme - no way UC is going that (this was a small elite place). The major student issues in terms of safety are stranger access to dorms / bathrooms at night, theft issues (bikes / bags etc), and nuisance issues (noise, weed smoke, parties etc).

mindcrime 5y ago

As promised, here is the response I received from Santa Barbara County FD: Thanks for reaching out to us. While the Munger Hall is not our review responsibility, we are working very closely with the UCSB Fire Marshal in his review. We have a great working relationship with the Fire Marshal. We have had numerous meetings on this project and the Fire Marshal is open and willing to suggestions when it come to fire and life safety issues. We will continue to meet on this project and it is our hope that all fire and life safety issues will be addressed. I am available if you have any further questions or concern. You can also reach out the University Fire Marshal. So, not a lot of detail (I expected that) but it is interesting that they do seem to allude to there indeed being fire safety issues which need to be addressed.