It pains me to write this, but I think the fitness-center/gym that Mrs ERJ and I frequent is a house-of-horrors from a fire evacuation standpoint.
Let me explain
I am the paranoid guy who likes to practice fire drills when he spends the night in a strange hotel room. Which way do I turn going out the door? Where is the stairwell? What visual and tactile clues identify the stairwell? Is it at the end of the hallway (preferred) or is the entrance a tiny alcove just like the room-doors? Where does the bottom of the stairwell kick me out of the building? Where am I parked relative to that point?
Where is my alternate stairwell?
I also worked in factories and we had fire drills. Sometimes the evacuation routes took us through high-hazard areas...places where extremely flammable or explosive materials were stored...places where material was precariously stacked or automated equipment wasn't necessarily stopped.
So, I admit to being paranoid and perhaps even overly vigilant. That is just the way I am wired and I deal with it.
Specifics on the facility
The fitness-center/gym complex is a warren of divided spaces with no discernible rhyme or reason. As far as I can tell, there is no master floor-plan posted anywhere and I cannot remember entering a space where the "Evacuation Route" was posted. Maybe they were there. Maybe they were small or not near the door.
Large portions of the building are off-limits to the general public.
Obviously, men's and women's locker rooms are off limits if you are not of the correct gender.
Staff break-rooms and locker rooms are off-limits.
Physical, occupational and cardio therapy areas are off-limits.
Classrooms and conference rooms are off-limits.
Storage spaces are off-limits and my sense is that they are large and stuffed with flammables like mats, tables, mobile partitions, carpeting etc. Those items, when burned, often produce copious amounts of thick, toxic smoke.
Cooking areas are off-limits and are potential sources of ignition and flammable liquids.
Material receiving areas (trucking docks) are off-limits. I have seen tires and high-pressure gas cylinders in these areas.
Custodial areas are off-limits. Those areas potentially hold toxic materials if heated. They are a choke-point for materials that are being disposed of.
All of those forbidden area makes it very hard to scout-out evacuation routes. The official evacuation plan might route people through those areas in the event that the "regular" exit is not accessible...but I have never walked through them.
General exercise spaces are confusing
They have multiple doors and are daisy-chained together. You have to go through the locker rooms to get to some of them. Some lead to other exercise spaces and are used by staff. Others lead to storage areas. I have no clue where others lead to. There is the potential to walk around in circles inside the facility or hit a dead-end.
The rooms are covered with mirrors. In the event of smoke, the illuminated "EXIT" signage might not be clear due to reflected images.
Incidental notes
The clientele of the center might spend a few hours a month in the center so most of us will not be familiar with the layout.
Most of the clientele will use only a few of the services and will see only a fraction of the facility.
Many of the staff are "affiliates" or contracted help so there is no guarantee that they will be helpful in the event of a low-visibility evacuation.
Policy is tolerant of people leaving locks on lockers. Lockers can be rented so regular clients can leave a change of clothes. There is no policing to ensure transients are not storing (potentially nefarious) items in a locked locker.
In the event of a mutual-aid fire alarm, the supporting agencies are entirely volunteer firefighters. Sending them into a building with a maze-like layout is foolhardy especially when visibility is bad.
The facility leases out space for "events" like birthday parties and corporate training.
The facility is large. It has about 70,000 square feet of interior space and over a quarter-mile of exterior wall.
The clientele in the west and northwest parts of the building are often limited mobility (Physical Therapy), sensory handicapped (Occupational Therapy), unpredictable (Behavioral Therapy) or fragile/impaired respiration (Cardiac Therapy). Additionally, many of the clientele in that part of the building are ancient and their mental processing speed when confronted with novel challenges might be slower.
Tasks for me
Look for signage. It might be there but obscured due to visual clutter. If it is there and I didn't see it, shame on me.
But as I try to remember the "space", it is largely partitioned with half-walls, plants in urns, lattice and has a very open and airy feel to it. There isn't a lot of wall to hang things on. Additionally, the mirrors make the spaces seem semi-infinite and magnify the visual clutter.
Potential action items for the facility
Put tape on floor to direct clients out if visibility is impaired and first-responders in. Different colors can designate different areas.
Audit signage.
Store flammables with high toxicity when burning off-site.
Post a regular audit schedule for the "back rooms" like receiving and housekeeping to ensure hazardous materials don't accumulate. Have a sheet that must be initialed and dated that the site manager actually toured the area.
Review policies that might allow clients to be placed (staged) in treatment rooms before the therapist arrives. They are most at-risk in the event of an evacuation event.
Review locker policy on an annual basis to weigh risk-reward of allowing people to store private property in locked lockers in the facility. Traceability of locker "ownership" is a cluster-festival and the facility has some degree of litigation exposure to contents stored in lockers. Example: A malicious person stored peanut dust in his locker and another gym-goer goes into anaphylactic shock.
Supplemental materials
Hamlet Chicken Processing Plant
Overview of fire/smoke hazards on airplanes
One of the recurring themes in these disasters is that the "safe way out" didn't work out. Victims were stacked up against the door that didn't open. Other ways out were available but the victim's were unable to process alternatives due to panic and the crowd-mentality.
There is probably a deeper message here.
Interesting fact I learned when I was installing the systems for a couple years... Fire Sprinkler systems are not (required to be) designed to save the building. They are designed to prevent the path to the exits from being consumed with fire. Look at the ceiling and see if there are fire-sprinklers.
ReplyDeleteAs a general rule, whatever the business, the employee charged with developing an evacuation plan is a retarded idiot, chosen for the task only because he / she couldn't find a way to duck it. And, I've never heard of - or seen - anyone in management ever "proofing" an evac plan by walking it themself.
ReplyDeleteOver the years, when traveling I developed the habit of carrying small ( 1.5"-2.0" diameter) "dots" of adhesive-backed white reflective sheeting (wholesale distributors of materials used by individual sign shops usually have short "roll ends" of all colors of reflective and non-reflective sheeting - it comes in 12" and 24" wide rolls - they will sell for a few bucks, and now you can buy them ready-made on Amazon).
When staying in a hotel I, like you, would check out the evac chart on the room door and "wander a bit" to see where one needed to go in an evac and where one wound up; often one can access a stairwell but once the door closes you cannot exit onto any floor, you must go all the way to the ground floor and often the only exit door takes you outside, where you are, predictably, positionally disoriented.
That said, I never leave home without a Tube of Dark Repellant - a 300-500 lumen tactical flashlight (before LEDs the best option was a AA Maglite) and there's a simple 1-cell AAA light with a pocket clip (you don't need 500 lumens to find a dropped pen).
The white reflective dots go on the proper evac door 6" above the knob or handle so I can find them easily in the dark with a flashlight. (I've visited those hotels a couple years later and the dots are almost always still there; if uniformly sized and placed they look "official" so they get left alone).
As for the evac path leading to a safety mine field, unless you can access the entire path it's a crap shoot. I never carried one of those "10-minute-air" smoke hoods but did think about it.
As a pro tip, "never evac barefoot" and if you've got 20 seconds, a damp (wet but not dripping) bath towel can provide protection against heat and will filter some smoke.
At the gym I wear a neck chain with a very small AA flashlight, a car key and a house key on it, and the folding knife in my pocket has a tungsten glass breaker on the non-sharp end. Should there be a need to rapidly escape the facility I have a means of getting home and into the house without needing to visit my locker.
Quit going to the gym. Get an outside wood burning furnace then you can wrestle the logs into position, cut, split and stack. Great exercise. Then the only escape route you need to remember is from where you keep your beer. Works great for me. ---ken
ReplyDeleteNo place is off-limits in the event of a fire (or other disaster) if it leads out.
ReplyDeleteHow are you going to know if it is a dead-end or actually leads out of the building?
DeleteIn my experience, working in commercial construction remodeling all over the country, a building has to be over a certain size before overhead sprinklers are required. But every commercial job I've ever been on, has had at least one visit from the local Fire Marshall. Exit signs are are one of their pet peeves. They have to be prominently displayed and they have to light up when the power goes out in the event of a fire. Evacuation plans have to be displayed in certain areas of the building and there has to be an adequate number of fire extinguishers placed around the interior. In addition, all the signage and the extinguishers have to be handicap accessible and the signage also has to have Braille characters for the visually impaired.
ReplyDeleteYMMV.
I don`t go to the gym, I`m too cheap. I drop twenty five pennies on the floor, then get down and lay on the floor, pick one penny up and put it on the shelf. Works every muscle and joint. Woody
ReplyDeleteWell, I will have that rattling around in my head all day for every building I walk in. Thanks for the thinking fodder, ERJ.
ReplyDeleteI have complained that the official evacuation route at my office sends us all into a fenced parking lot whose only exits are right next to the building.
ReplyDeleteIf anything is happening to the building (fire, gas leak, active shooter, etc), we are penned in the parking lot.
I have figured out ways to exit, but they aren't easy.
Jonathan
Somebody with a little bit of foresight might snip one of the wires in the chainlink fence once where it is high and again where it is low and leave the wire in-place.
DeleteWow great info got me thinking again. The place I went for PT had only 2 entrance/exits that I know of. Both went to the lobby exit. Equipment scattered around, mirrors on one wall, plus physically impaired people.
ReplyDeleteNot a great layout for evacuation.
Southern NH