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Not really, they are saying that the requirement for a second egress in multi-apartment buildings (which is not only a second fire door, it is also a second sta

• twblalock 4y ago
  That sounds fair on the surface, but we manage to build multi-egress buildings all the time in other countries, and if a single stairwell is the only egress a lot of people could die in a fire. Some of these mod-sized buildings are too tall to make jumping out of a window a realistic option. So I’m not really sympathetic to this argument. Unlike some building codes, this one is directly connected to a life and death issue and we have seen what happens in fires where people can’t get out.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, it seems to me that we can actually work out the situations involved, and being on the sixth floor of a building with only one fire egress seems undesirable. Perhaps it can be compensated for with various "either two egresses OR each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof for X minutes" or something, and bring back hook and ladder trucks (arguably which are not used as much because buildings now have multiple egresses when that tall).
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof for X minutes This is the kind of absurdly complex regulation that sounds simple, but is a lobbyist's dream. Two exits are easy to know when you've implemented, and easy for regulators to check if you've implemented. A "bedroom" being "fire proof" for X minutes will involve 900 pages of nonsense regulations from which lobbyists have carefully removed anything that will affect their bottom line. "Each bedroom must be equipped to be fire proof for X minutes" was the type of rule that caused the fire brigades to tell people in Grenfell to stay in their apartments, and even more importantly the type of rule that allowed contractors to claim compliance to was sufficient enough that they could use flammable, shit cladding that was illegal in Europe and the US, and install it incompetently (because if the units were "fireproof," who could care?)
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Very good points - and Grenfell is an example as to why these regulations exist; otherwise people would burn to death in "missing middle" housing and nobody would really care much.
        • nasmorn 4y ago
          I live in Vienna and almost all buildings are single staircases with 4-8 floors. Almost all house fires are in old housing stock. In new concrete apartment buildings it is usually a single apartment that burns out. It is an almost absurd fear compared to eg traffic related deaths.
          • twblalock 4y ago
            It’s one of those things that is rare and unlikely, yet is extremely bad when it happens. Kind of like how airline crashes are much rarer than car crashes, but they are also much worse and always make the news. When you have a 99% chance of things going well, and a 1% chance of things going badly, normally you would feel very safe. But when “things going badly” can mean dozens or hundreds of people dying in a fire, that 1% suddenly looks a lot more serious.
            • jaclaz 4y ago
              But the article is not about building codes for larger buildings, it is about the building code for small ones exceeding the single family house.
        • jaclaz 4y ago
          High-rise buildings are a completely different matter. Besides Grenfell, the same thing (without deaths, thankfully) happened in Milan (very similar issue with aluminium panels on the outside): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNvbxTMSM5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNvbxTMSM5Y What emerged from both these fires is that some of the "new" materials are far less safe than expected and that the fire brigades simply have no means to pump water at a height more than a few floors (ten-twelve?).
  • henrikschroder 4y ago
    Except what this site says is that counter-intuitively, this policy doesn't save lives, it's actually the opposite: "Zeidler explains that “this appears to be a reasonable precaution for life safety. However, the life safety of this single stair type in Europe has been equal to, if not better than ours,” due to the fact that the single stair scheme is shared between fewer units." And that's the thing, entire countries disagree on the necessity of a second stairwell for fire safety, and there's data to back up the position. But because a lot of people in North America have those (unfounded) fears, the second stairwell is part of the building code, and as a result an entire class of buildings don't get built because the economics don't work out.
    • WWLink 4y ago
      I'm siting here pondering how adding a second stairway to a building makes it economically unfeasible. What kinda crappy buildings are you making where the stairway is that substantial to the cost of the construction? And in low rise buildings, there's usually a LOT of stairways lol. A typic suburban US apartment complex has a half dozen buildings, and each one has maybe 12 apartments and like 4 stairways.
      • astrange 4y ago
        Adding a second stairway typically requires rearranging the building to be double-loaded (having a central hallway with apartments exclusively on either side), which wastes much more space, only allows windows on one side of the apartment, feels like you live in a hotel etc. https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-states-5197036 https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-sta...
        • frickinLasers 4y ago
          What's wrong with fire escapes? I see plenty of space to add those to a point access block.
    • twblalock 4y ago
      > But because a lot of people in North America have those (unfounded) fears, the second stairwell is part of the building code, and as a result an entire class of buildings don't get built because the economics don't work out. I don't believe the fears are unfounded, and frankly I don't see why anyone should buy what this Zeidler guy is selling -- if what he is saying is true, all it means is that European buildings should also be changed to have multiple egress options for every unit! Seriously, would you be willing to live on the 6th floor of a building where the only way out in a fire is a single staircase? Don't look at statistics to decide this: even if you would be safe most of the time, it only takes one outlier incident to kill you, so why put yourself in that situation?
  • squokko 4y ago
    How many fire deaths are worth how much housing? Inaccessibility of housing is tied to economic destitution, homelessness, and other things that directly cause deaths. It's entirely possible for more quality-adjusted life years to be lost in the path that causes less housing to be built.
• eklitzke 4y ago
  I don't understand. I live in a three-story apartment building in San Francisco that has about 20 units (ground floor is retail space, the upper two floors have 10 apartment units each). There's a single entrance and stairwell in my building. However my building also has two fire escapes (one of which is accessible via the hallway, I think the other fire escape is only accessible by certain apartment units) and an additional wooden staircase in the back that leads to the garbage area. I don't know all the zoning laws, but this is an extremely common layout in SF. My building, like many many other buildings in the city, was built in 1906 after the earthquake, and all of the building built in this time period have a very similar style and layout.
  • astrange 4y ago
    It's very common, especially in places like SF, for all the old buildings and neighborhoods that people actually like to be illegal to build if they were new. Of course, in SF it's practically illegal to build anything under any circumstances if any of your neighbors decide they don't like it.
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    According to the article, it's buildings with 2-4 units per floor that are significantly impacted by this rule. At 10 per floor, your building is a lot larger than the ones the article is talking about.
  • jaclaz 4y ago
    In the case of a fire where all apartments are occupied (each by two people on average) in your SF apartment, you have in theory 40 people/2 stairs= 20 people each (though it is more likely that there is a "main" stairwell, so that will take - say - 28 people and the other one 12. In a small multi-apartment block, up to 10-12 apartments (5/6 on 2 floors or 2/3 on 4-5 floors) the single stairs/fire exit will be used by the same amount of people or less. If you prefer, if you graph it, the function of number of stairs per block depends on number of apartments and the points are: 1=1 2=2 3=2 4=2 5=2 ... what the author is saying is that the step at 2 apartments is too low, compared to what are the norms in other countries and that these countries have not worse records, statistically, for deaths in fires. This latter is debatable, as there are so many factors involved such as efficiency of rescue/fire services, type of construction (materials used), height of rooms, sizes of windows, number of floors of the "average" building in any given country (and even local situations, city by city) that it is difficult to do a sensible comparison.