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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

Here's something that happened one week ago, a perfect (and sad) example of what happens when you only have one set of stairs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Osaka_building_fire

> The victims gasped for air and had difficulties escaping, as there was only one escape route, with the emergency stairs and elevators being located outside the clinic.

> Experts were surprised by the fire's high death toll. The authorities are investigating how victims became trapped and the floor filled up with smoke so quickly.

> Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Yasushi Kaneko ordered the inspection of some 30,000 buildings in Japan that have three or more floors, but only a single stairwell.

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A security camera in the building showed that Tanimoto tossed a bag, probably containing petrol, at the emergency exit. Tape is also believed to have been used to impede the use of the door. It is believed this was done so that clinic occupants would have a hard time evacuating. Investigators also found evidence of additional traps in the building.[21][22] The suspect was found to possess a knife, and blocked a person who tried to run back towards the elevator. The victims, with the path to the exits blocked by fire, went into inner windowless rooms in the back of the clinic where they died.[16]

When you have someone deliberately setting fires and blocking the escape routes with a knife, you have bigger problems than just one stairwell.

Similar thing happened at Kyoto Animation in 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack)

Sure, but you could say that about any fire where a bunch of people died. There are always "bigger problems" or else there wouldn't be a fire.

The point is, since it was deliberate, the person could almost as easily blocked both stairs. It's not comparable to an accidental fire that potentially impress a single staircase

I disagree that they could have done this just as easily. One person can only guard one way.

Yeah but one person who is setting fires could torch a stairwell, effectively blocking it without being there.

People setting these fires are not experts.

Let's say a lot of them are garbage and you only hear about the rare occasions it works. Let's say 10% of the time the fire is good enough to kill.

Two stair wells means only 1% of the time you get a kill.

Lighting two fires is also harder, you need more planning and stuff. So that probably equals out a bit for the better fire lighters.

If it's Mossad doing it then sure it's possibly similar.

"Police quoted witnesses who saw a man walking into the clinic with a paper bag, which he put on the floor, right next to a heater by the reception desk, and kicked it. Liquid poured out, caught fire and the whole floor was in flames and smoke."

Don't really need to be an expert in starting fires.

Seriously? We are talking about fire here. Set it and forget it, doesn't require constant attention ...

It does in most places - concrete stairwells (typical) don’t exactly love fire. Sheetrock similar.

If an accelerant is used that is continuously burned until exhausted , then I'm not sure it matters where or what materials are present. If there is a fire at an exit that persists and is difficult to extinguish, said arsonist can then move to the next exit, and perform the same action. Thus blocking multiple exits while acting as a single individual. That's my point.

But hopefully the fire alarms are causing an evacuation and those using the other door will stop someone from going in

As someone who has been trapped in a building during a fire by a pipe wielding maniac. It isn't always that simple.

Story time?

It’s surprisingly hard to put enough accelerant in a place to burn awhile (5-10 minutes?) in a way that can’t be interfered with and will keep going without tending, without drawing attention to yourself while doing so if anyone is paying attention. Most portable methods (gasoline can?) are so volatile it is just going to explode almost immediately and are easy to recognize as a hazard.

Certainly not impossible, but it requires more craftiness and more prep the more complicated we get.

Which hopefully there aren’t that many folks who are likely to do so. And if someone does, we can catch them fast.

Basic redundancy is a good idea (n=2) in general, for many many reasons. Maintenance doesn’t take out the only way out for instance, or a single fight or accident doesn’t leave someone stuck.

N=5 is probably overkill for anything for a huge convention center.

People might start to notice something amiss while you're setting fire to the first staircase.

That also happens, or effectively happens.

Part of modern US stairwell regulation also learned from 9/11, where they found out it wasn't a great idea to have all the required stairwells very close to each other either.

2 stairways are much harder to block than one, especially if they are at opposite ends of the structure. One person will struggle to keep them blocked.

That’s a whole lot better than 1 stairwell!

Why? Lock one, go to the other, douse it with something flammable, light it.

Anyway. Most of the world does not go up in flames regularly, despite having not having this regulation.

Why mitigate against fire at all? If the standard is that most of the world has to be burning for that to be practical, it'll never be practical.

Fire safety has tremendous value, but it should mandate results not specific methods.

Fire extinguishers are remarkably effective at opening locked doors, FYI. And a surprising number of people are not only aware of this fact, but remember where the fire extinguishers are.

Some folks would get stuck and not get out, but it generally requires dedicated eyes on a crowd if you want to keep them inside something for any length of time. Hence prison guards, locks being a dedicated profession, etc.

To be fair, one person has less of a chance of blocking all 5 exits if that many exists and they're spaced out well enough

So how many exits are needed for extremely rare circumstances? 5 stairwells plus two elevator shafts could take up >80% of floor space in a lot of high rise buildings...

> So how many exits are needed for extremely rare circumstances?

Keep in mind that the bread and butter of engineering is "extremely rare circumstances".

In civil engineering, infrastructure is designed with 100 year floods and 50 year seismic events in mind.

Blocking the only exit does not come even close to be a rare event.

You don't have to plan for malice, just plan for a fire where it is probably a lot less likely for exits at both sides of the building to be blocked.

> When you have someone deliberately setting fires and blocking the escape routes with a knife, you have bigger problems than just one stairwell.

The software world is well versed in the concept of a single point of failure, and the importance of eliminating it and mitigating any chance.

And yet here we are downplaying a critical design problem because it was a single point of failure?

As always, you have to balance the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack with the (opportunity) cost of building additional escape routes.

Not just the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack, but the risk of other things that are likely to block a single exit (as fire sometimes does.)

Yes, but it looks like that sort of events (where additionally you have to evacuate rather than shelter inside your apartment) seem to be exceedingly rare, given that lack of a second stairwell has not been a problem at all in several Western countries.

> As always, you have to balance the risk of a crazy trap-setting knifeman attack with the (opportunity) cost of building additional escape routes.

A "crazy trap-setting knifeman attack" is not the only scenario that results in a blocked exit trapping people inside the building in a life-threatening situation. Think about it for a second. Imagine, for instance, that a fire breaks out for any reason. Is this unthinkable? And how do you factor in emergency response personnel trying to go up the same stairs that are the only way out of people trapped in the building?

We should not forget past lessons for no reason.

Yes, but as the article pointed out - building fires are no more deadly in countries that allow single staircase construction. I suspect that in reality it's simply an incredible rare occurance that not only you must evacuate(rather than stay put in your flat behind fireproof door), but also that the stairs are blocked, AND the fire brigade cannot clear them out AND the fire brigade cannot get you out any other way.

Yes, past lessons should be remembered but it looks like there is no data that would support building double staircases in reality - it's just too rare of a problem. Same reason why almost nowhere in the world requires outside fire exits like many buildings in NYC do - they are great in idea and I'm sure there are examples of them saving lives, but it's not worth making them a requirement for every building ever made.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a person with a knife blocking the exit, or fallen debris. An exit can be blocked by anything, that’s why it’s important to have multiple escape routes.

Everyone in the comments is raising the (valid) fire safety argument; however, I'd like to point out that this is a non-obvious trade-off.

How many house fires are there? How many of them are in tall buildings? How many of them would block just one stair, and not two?

Yes, there is a probability that an extra stair will save your life; however, this is a very tiny probability, against a certainty of extra living space, for everyone, every day.

The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that

I hate the space argument because its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue - make the building 1 floor taller, or don't cram your residents just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.

Given the popularity of wood construction (5-1s are most of what gets build afaict), I think the main limiter is how big you're allowed to build wood buildings.

> The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that

Why wouldn't you be able to compare statistics from the US to any other country that doesn't have that rule?

There are alot of factors: building codes, materials, age, likely ignition sources . Probably not impossible, but difficult to find a meaningful way to compare.

I'm also guessing that fire reporting doesn't include the level of detail you would need. For example, a fire in which firefighters were able to tackle from two sides would be quickly extinguished, where as the same fire with 1-sided access might have become a disaster. But thats a what-if, only learned the hard way.

Because countries that don't have that rule also don't have a bunch of other important fire safety rules.

Citation needed? What other important fire safety rules are "missing" in e.g. (from TFA) South Korea, China, Sweden, Italy, or Germany?

We can compare fatality rates from fires between countries with dual exits and those without:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_building_or_structure_...

We can also see if mass casualty fires in buildings stopped happening after the regulation change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Theatre_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

https://www.nytimes.com/1860/02/03/archives/calamitous-fire-...

My counter argument would be regulations for new buildings take a long time to be widely applied, I think you would need to judge every single fire on a case by case basis, not region or by period.

And there are a ton of other variables. Construction materials, fire response, suppression and alarm systems, the purpose of the building, etc.

> just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.

You realize that this would mean the three residents would have to pay more for their unit, right? It isn’t just developers “milking” condo buyers or tenants. It has to do with efficiency.

People pay more for units all the time for various reasons - location, orientation, superstition, etc. I’m sure they’ll add “not suffocating to death during a fire” to the list.

I wouldn’t want to pay 33% more for that extra increment of safety. I drive a car, after all.

The premium that you pay extra for the safety equipment in your car is likely more than 33%.

We would have many new cars for 4-digit prices if not for the large number of safety systems required on cars.

Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you, though, and carry along a vast amount of stored energy. Buildings are designed to stand still and generally not be flammable. The expected value calculations are seemingly quite a bit different.

> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you

And buildings in North America are often framed out of the same material that they burn in their fireplaces.

Both present inherent dangers. Both have widespread safety regulations for this reason.

Vehicle accidents are the 2nd leading cause of accidental death in the US and fires are 6th. And this is the result of many decades of both being highly regulated.

And I still find it surreal that people in world's richest country live in wooden houses.

People still die in scary numbers there no matter the regulations.

Cars can't be made safer anymore. 60Mphs frontal collisions have single digit percentage survivability chance because physics.

Homes can be made much safer by building them differently.

Wood tends to get a lot of criticism on the internet as a building material, but it has advantages as well.

Cars can absolutely be made safer. They certainly haven’t stopped getting safer yet.

No amount of safety system will save you in a 60mph crash.

1. People survive crashes at highway speeds in the US literally every day, at 60mph and above.

2. 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle. The way with which a vehicle’s momentum at 60mph is dissipated makes a critical difference to the crash energy imparted on the occupants. Road design has greatly improved this in recent decades.

3. Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes.

> Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes.

Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash

> 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle.

The force imparted on you in a 60mph crash by the seatbelt will be lethal no matter how much deceleration space you have. You got at 27 meters per second, and you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.

> Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash

It counts as making cars safer which was the above claim I am supporting.

> you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.

Most vehicle crashes are not head-on incidents.

Improvements in road design have affected the proportion of crashes that are head-on. Recent improvements in active safety features may decrease this further: eg. lane departure mitigation.

In many real-world accidents, vehicles have dozens or hundreds of meters to decelerate.

> And I still find it surreal that people in world's richest country live in wooden houses.

A lot of those people live in seismically active areas. While modern masonry construction is certainly safer than traditional masonry, in general wood is far less dangerous than stone or brick in an earthquake.

And steel, or reinforced concrete are safer than both.

Where in the world are single-family homes typically made of steel or reinforced concrete?

Note: not apartments. Houses.

Quite a lot in Russia, China, and Middle East from my personal experience.

Those aren't exactly the locations that come to mind when you think of "luxury housing". I mean, I don't think people are living in those houses by choice, do you?

Steel and concrete are ugly and cold. Wood is warm. Even brick and stone are more humane.

Wood is one of the better materials if there is a fire. While it burns (a negative), it burns slow and gives plenty of warning before it fails. Most other building materials fail suddenly in a fire. Engineered wood has the same issues)

> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you

It's not the speed that kills you, it's the impact. Multifloor buildings are designed to help you live and work at a height that can kill you, and to prevent air entering and escaping which can kill you.

If you can assume that the risk of fire or collapse isn't worth mitigating against, why not assume that a car will never hit anything?

The risk of fire and collapse is mitigated to a large degree already. People are arguing about the relative utility of further mitigations. At least in the US, folk mostly build interior walls with sheetrock and their exterior walls with cement based composites. Bedrooms are legally required to have smoke detectors. Electrical and gas runs are supposed to be installed "to code". Tall buildings require engineering to make appropriately strong structures. Buildings don't completely burn down or collapse very often, especially compared to the frequency of serious car crashes.

He could pay a bit extra to reduce his commute from 30 minutes to 29 minutes. That would already be a reduction of death risk higher than the second staircase in the building.

It does not guarantee that you won't encounter a deadly fire. It just adds one extra escape route for this extremely rare event. You could also add an escape slide for each apartment.

Pay more related to the average cost. The point is to lower the average cost by providing more units.

Obviously thats the outcome, but thats not anyone's problem except the developer, and buyers know the price going into their purchase.

For example, if I can cram 14 windowless apartments into the same floor, is it really unfair that that 4 tenants would have to pay more than the 14?

The amount of available space isn't the only benefit of using only one staircase. It also means the units can face outward in multiple directions and there's a more central common area.

A lot of regulations are designed to make new construction as expensive as possible and limit usable floor space as much as possible.

No one should be surprised that fire safety laws are going to the extreme for safety at a large cost to floor space.

Citation needed.

Government agencies dont allow authoritative sources to remark on their incompetence. See the last 2 years as a citation of that.

You were allowed to remark on it here, you just didn't.

Municipalities in USA are adopting code for residential new construction to require sprinklers. Big cost that most people won't do anything to stop it because it is only for really big houses (for now). In fifteen years people will wonder why new housing is so expensive and every size house has sprinklers which the homeowner must hire someone to maintain. And pay for sprinkler inspection report prior to resale.

On a totally different note, I can't find any cheap or affordable new cars. Am looking for basic wheels without finicky gadgets like backup cameras and tire pressure monitors and lane departure warnings. Something simple and without high insurance costs to cover all those gadgets I don't need.

I wonder why things (house, car) seem unaffordable and contain gadgets which are difficult to fix and which increase insurance costs. What happened America?

Well for one, they have been required equipment for years - tire pressure sensors and backup cameras in general. So you’d need to go quite far back.

And the still working quite far back vehicles are pretty valuable because they have stood the test of time and don’t have all the buzzword crap, so folks don’t want to part with them.

The old cheap ones also got fed into a grinder (essentially) for cash for clunkers.

I would install fire sprinklers in my house, but there isn't a simple form based code. When I install outlets there are a few rules (were to install them, how many on a circuit, and many other details easy to look up in a wiring for dummies book), plumbing has similar rules. For fire sprinklers I need to go back go engineering and calculate all the details, not only is that a lot of work, I'm not certified to do them so the inspector won't pass my work unless I hire one of the few (and thus expensive ) engineers who are qualified.

If fire advocates really cared they would figure out the rules to follow and that would make it much cheaper for everyone.

For what it’s worth, I used to think the same as you regarding cars, but since many of those features are required now you can’t find a new car without them. So I had to get them, and turns out, they’re pretty useful.

My house had sprinklers and it was not a big deal. There was one special valve they said you should change every five years. But that’s the only maintenance anyone ever told me. No one had to check them before the sale.

It's not the two egress per se, it's about not having cul-de-sac that fire could isolate from the exits.

A circular shape with one exit it's much harder to be stuck into by a single ignition point.

That's still a cul-de-sac, just one with a loop.

Money is just a resource and allocating this resource toward staircases may save fewer lives than allocating it in some other way.

"its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue"

You need to go back and read the article more closely. It's a HUGE quality of life issue; mainly US building codes restrict apartments to one side of the building which has all kinds of implications - cross airflow, alignment of rooms with the sun - and the ability to have more variety of sizes of units to better meet needs that currently go unmet, especially with families.

I mean if you look at the article the majority of it is all about quality of life - not only for the apartments, but greater/more effective use of the stairwells and common areas.

You are free to ignore fire safety rules in your own private house, built far away from everyone else's private homes (and anything flammable). History shows that fire can be disasterous.

In fact, every additional staircase adds a potentially useful escape route, so how many will be enough?

> In 2011, Tanimoto stabbed his own son in the head in an apparent forced suicide.

That's the weirdest euphemism for murder I've ever seen.

> That's the weirdest euphemism for murder I've ever seen.

I don't believe he killed his son, and I believe the wording in the articles is intended to indicate that he tried to force his son to kill himself and ended up stabbing him in the head.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Osaka_building_fire

Good point. But to be fair, you should consider the injuries and deaths caused by elderly falling off stairs - 1M injuries, 12,000 deaths in the US alone. [0]

Compared that with 3,700 deaths and 16,600 injuries for ALL fires, not just fires in buildings [1].

My view would be that stairs KILL, and that new buildings should avoid stairs (at least, within a single unit) at all costs. We should also rethink how we design stairs and stair safety, and adjust building codes accordingly. Of course, this will most likely never happen.

[0]: https://www.attorneywdkickham.com/stairway-staircase-acciden....

[1]: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/

It would be far-fetched to think that having a second staircase for egress would result in additional deaths. More staircases does not cause more traversals of staircases.

Secondary staircases are often steeper to save money.

Turning stairs into ramps doesn't change anything about this. The point isn't the stairs, it's the exits. We just haven't figured out how to have entrances and exits in multi-story buildings that don't involve stairs or elevators. I don't think chutes and ladders would be safer for the elderly.

Stairs can be made a lot safer for elderly people. One way is to put in landings every 3-4 stairs and change the direction 90 degrees each time. This way if you fall it’s not very far. You can also have very firm, easy to grasp handrails and thick padded carpet on the stairs and landings to soften them. Finally, for very frail elderly people you can install a chair lift so they can ride up and down instead of climbing the stairs.

Not really. The wikipage says some pretty disturbing things under the investigation section. No amount of staircases would have helped.

I don't think that's true; the article and the sources it cited specifically cite having only one escape route as a contributing factor.

But also in Japan they allow for rescue/escape through special windows which can be broken in an emergency (the ubiquitous red triangles you see on all tall buildings), so in effect there are many escape routes.

Yeah--what matters is two means of egress. It doesn't matter what form they take. We live in a two-story house, the stairs are the only normal means of escape. But the building code requires bedrooms to have windows sufficient for a firefighter in full gear to go through and there's an emergency ladder stored next to the most accessible window in the one upstairs room actually used for sleeping.

Yea, every fire code I know how requires a minimum of 2 escape route for occupancy

You can satisfy that with a fire escape in a lot of cases, I would have thought?

In practice, usually fire escapes are more harm than help. A fair amount of disasters happened where in the event of an actual fire, the fire escape had been poorly maintained and became overloaded so that they fell to the ground during the evacuation.

As the article states, there are lots of Western countries (including mine) that do not require a second stairwell for midrise apartment buildings. It's not a theoretical question. In a properly compartmentalized apartment building, you should not exit your apartment unless it's the one that's on fire.

Well I am never convinced by an argument of "well others do it", that is never a valid justification IMO. The US has always done things different than the EU, and IMO that is a good thing.

As to fire, that is but one of many other safety concerns, I personally will never live in a place that only has 1 escape vector, even if fire concerns were mitigated

Not perusing available evidence when making policy decisions like this is simply bad decisionmaking. “Doing things our way” just out of principle is just as silly as blindly aping others. It’s possible to (fallaciously) argue against anything by saying “but we’re special so doesn’t apply to us” and I’ve seen too many bad decisions made due to what is essentially a case of the NIH syndrome.

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