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Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

As an American living in Switzerland one thing that has consistently surprised me is the difference in fire safety rules: not having any smoke alarm or fire extinguishers in homes is common, and it's also common to be able to lock people inside rooms/apartments/buildings so that they can't leave without having a key. It's possible to lock someone in my apartment even if they have the key if the door is locked with the key left in on the other side.

In the US if I checked out a rental home as a possible place to live and it had any one room where you could lock someone in and they would be trapped I'd wonder what weird shit happened there.

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You are much more likely to die in a fire in USA, so it makes sense for Americans to take more measurements to prevent it. But in for example Switzerland fires is not a big thing so there is no need to have any laws against it.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-death-rates

I'm also guessing german europe (swiss, austria, germany) lives in an earthquake free zone, so they can make stone buildings without much consideration for earthquakes while most of the US population has to think about earthquakes and/or hurricanes, so housing is more likely to go towards flexible and flammable wood.

Actually, it's mostly a cost thing. US code allows very inexpensive building materials and practices relative to Europe.

I suspect that is a result of different cultural expectations related to who should be able to afford to own their own home - even if the homes don't last very long.

The choice of wood for residential housing is based on cost. Trees are plentiful in the U.S., so wood construction is the cheapest option. In countries without lots of trees, they’ll use concrete, stone, or something else.

Germany has plenty of wood, and ~300 years ago the majority of buildings were made from wood, with straw and clay as filler material, and straw roofs.

From my understanding the switch to stone was mostly for fire resistance. City walls lead to very dense cities where fire could spread rapidly. Stone walls with clay tile roofs make it much harder for any fire to spread within a building and to other buildings.

Today we would have the fire fighting techniques and more fire resistant wood panels, but old habits die hard (and we are used to buildings standing for hundreeds of years)

In a house fire you'll usually be killed by your burning synthetic furnishings before the burning structure gets much of a chance.

Based on this data, the fire death rate in the US is 1.16 per 100k pop. and the rate in Switzerland is 0.28 per 100k pop. Percentage wise, that's a big difference, but that's only because both of these numbers are extremely small. I don't think it's really accurate to say you're much more likely to die in a fire in the USA; it's extremely rare in both countries.

1.16/0.28 is a big difference.

If Switzerland had the US rate, ~75 more people would die every year.

If the US had the Swiss rate, ~2800 people would live to see another year.

An extra 2800 people out of a population of 380 million? Statistically meaningless.

The victim death count from 9/11 was 2,977, and that appeared to have at least some effect on the American psyche

The deaths didn't. The news coverage of the deaths did.

I know the US (330 mil. pop.) is a much larger country than Switzerland (8 mil. pop.). You also could have said: "The cost of improving the Swiss housing and infrastructure to reduce the mortality rate due to fire would be a miniscule fraction of what it would be in the US". You have to normalize to look at these things, and you also have to look at the bigger picture, or you could totally mislead yourself.

Put in normalized terms,

- 0.00028% of the Swiss pop. dies from fire annually

- 0.00116% of the US pop. dies from fire annually

- 0.001% of the US pop. dies from drowning annually

- 0.001% of the US pop. dies from exposure to mechanical force annually

- 0.006% of the US pop. dies from gunshot annually

- 0.01% of the US pop. dies from falling annually

- 0.015% of the US pop. dies from road injuries annually

- 0.03% of the US pop. dies from respiratory illness annually

Here's [0] a visualization I made of causes of mortality a few years back. Play around with this a little bit; it's pretty interesting looking at actual mortality rates.

[0] http://bl.ocks.org/MattTriano/raw/154e9c142504d61985e2b65287...

Don't know about Switzerland, but as an European living in the US, I think the American fire safety rules are what they are mainly because most houses here are basically matchstick houses built from prefab low quality wood which would get devoured by flames in minutes. And the fire-resistant building materials are super toxic when they actually burn. So fire is a very big deal...

Anecdotal, we had a fire in my building because the wrong type of lightbulbs were installed in the hallways and because of their size, they were too close to the drywall which in turn caught fire. So.. yeah. Matchstick.

I stayed in a house in Germany in which the walls were filled with dried-straw for insulation. It was several hundred years old. There was a no-smoking rule.

> There was a no-smoking rule.

Which to be honest says not a lot about anything, because this isn't that unusual in Central Europe.

Also: a lot of the old wooden houses are far better in terms of fire resistance than you'd suspect on first glance, wood often outperforms concrete and steel when it comes to structural integrity in a fire.

I don't know about the straw thing, I only know it mixed with clay.

The no-smoking bit was me being a bit, ah, dry. Sorry it didn't come across better.

The home in question belonged to the extended family of my host family while I was an exchange student. I went with them to a maintenance day and did wallpaper. I got a very close look at the walls, not to mention the repeated lectures on what a firetrap it was.

Trust me, it was.

I have a similar anecdote. The walls of the main building at my university were full of hay and paraffin wax. This is in the UK. We were very conscious of fire safety there...

For about the last 20 years of my life as an American, 99.9% of all buildings I enter have a no-smoking rule. The only exceptions have been bars in kind of backwards places that I've had to go on business, like Jacksonville, FL.

It’s probably more to do with the age of the buildings. Generally you don’t need to update the safety level to today’s standars unless you do some major changes.

It may or may not be the case that US houses catch fire more often, but fire is always a very big deal if it does happen and then you really don’t want to be locked inside the ‘fire-proof’ house.

> prefab low quality wood

Excuse me? What exactly is "low quality wood"?

What are you claiming determines "wood quality"? And are you insinuating that "high" quality wood somehow... burns more slowly or something? All of this is new to me...

Also the vast majority of US homes are not prefab at all, not sure what that has to do with anything. And I'm not aware of a correlation between prefab construction techniques and fire hazards.

Now it's absolutely true that different parts of the world use different materials -- cinder blocks vs. wood vs. stone -- but that has much more to do with climate, available materials, and century of construction, rather than "quality".

Wood generally falls into two categories: hardwood and softwood. Hardwoods like oak are more dense, harder to light, and take longer to grow, so they are more expensive. Softwoods like pine are less dense, easier to light, and grow faster, so they are cheaper. Within each category there are additional ranges of cost and quality.

New homes in America tend to be wood-framed. Cheap materials are popular in American home construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softwood

Thank you, you beat me to it.

I would add this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri... which explains my matchstick metaphor

> Building codes evolved, too, as insurers and fire-safety-equipment manufacturers pushed for scientific, “performance-based” codes that emphasized lab-determined fire-resistance ratings over specific materials and incorporated new technologies such as the automated fire sprinkler.

> Stick construction allows builders to use cheaper casual labor rather than often-unionized skilled tradespeople. And it makes life easier for electricians, plumbers, and the like because it leaves open spaces through which wires, pipes, and ducts can run. Still, there’s a reason why stick wasn’t the default for big apartment buildings until recently, and why these buildings are limited in height: Sticks burn.

> Now it's absolutely true that different parts of the world use different materials -- cinder blocks vs. wood vs. stone -- but that has much more to do with climate, available materials, and century of construction, rather than "quality".

Another reason you missed is money. Ticky tacky is cheap and ubiquitous in your average dwelling in America.

> Don't know about Switzerland, but as an European living in the US, I think the American fire safety rules are what they are mainly because most houses here are basically matchstick houses built from prefab low quality wood which would get devoured by flames in minutes. And the fire-resistant building materials are super toxic when they actually burn.

Also US electric plugs are inherent fire hazards, much more so than anything you find in europe.

I grew up in Austria and live in Germany (so two neighbouring countries to Switzerland) and here it is mandatory to have at least smoke alarms. Fire extinguishers are mostly only needed for public buildings and server rooms and such. Germans especially take their "Brandschutz" very seriously especially regarding emergency exits etc.

However in the end you are responsible for your own safety. If you are in a room with a lock, make sure you don't lock yourself in. Locking people in is a bad idea regardless of situation (and I am pretty sure it is illegal to do so against their will).

You should also take care not to light your house or person on fire, which is a bad idea and probably also illegal (regardless of will).

> Locking people in is a bad idea regardless of situation (and I am pretty sure it is illegal to do so against their will)

As an American I still find it weird that it is even possible to lock someone in: anyone I've asked has had stories about young kids locking themselves or their parents in or out of a room with no easy way to fix the situation (resulting in things like balcony jumping). I don't see the benefit in designing things that way.

I'm currently living in an apartment in Switzerland where the house and the whole street is a UNESCO World Heritage. Due to the building regulations that accompanies, lots of wood is still used. Like for example the whole attic is made of wood.

Because of that we can call the firefighters at not cost, even false alarms are not penalized. But no mandatory smoke alarms or fire extinguishers even though this building still has a working old time furnace for heating. Go figure.

Maybe they expect the Swiss neighbor watch to raise an alarm more accurately than a smoke detector would. Old Swiss people are always suspiciously watching over their neighbors.

I guess it could still depend on country, but in EU smoke alarms are mandatory.

No one checks it for individuals though.

Are they checked for individuals in the US? The only time this would be verified is after construction which is when they'll also be checked in the EU.

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