Everything related to fires got better: more and better smoke and CO detectors, interior sprinklers, regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses, reduced smoking rates, increased awareness, faster response times, closure of firetrap rooming houses (fwiw: closing rooming houses contributes to the homelessness problem), better apartment inspections ...
We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
Redundancy matters when it protects from plausible issues.
> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.
When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.
Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.
External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago with existing buildings that were a fire trap and clearly better than nothing. However even then they knew they were not ideal.
Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.
I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.
I've had friends that have been fire fighters and I think the burnout is real. They're not dealing with structure fires much anymore which is what a lot of their training deals with. Rather they do a lot of social work in the area taking care of the unhoused, disinfranchised, mentally disabled, etc... all while having this unique training.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?
Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
I realize it which is why their strategy is a good one. Does it make sense for the people who are able to do that job also all be able to put out fires?
I think someone that can carry grandma down the stairs and also occasionally put out a catastrophic fire is a pretty reasonable and efficient use of taxpayer money. The alternative would be what, having two different people to do those things?
It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
Where I live, the fire department has rescue trucks which sometimes can be large (like a ladder-less fire truck) but can also be as small as a heavy duty work truck. Some departments have enough money to have all kinds of various vehicles for special situations while other departments have just enough to own one vehicle to cover as many needs as possible. It would make more sense to buy something smaller but can they justify the cost to the county or city? And in cities, they still need the big ladder truck and likely need to host an ambulance in the station and probably a fire chief vehicle too. The money is limited as well as the space. I'm sure cities are already rethinking what they actually need now versus 50 years ago. I've already seen paramedic vehicles that are not ambulances, they look like a work van or truck, just enough for two paramedics and enough supplies to treat someone that doesn't need to immediately go to the hospital or to serve as an auxiliary during a mass casualty event. The truck is way cheaper than an ambulance.
Powerlifting doesn't teach you the technique and spotting required to walk backwards down a staircase while holding a stretcher above your head so that grandma, who is in extreme pain, doesn't slide off and tumble to the bottom.
The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.
Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.
In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.
So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.
The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.
In the UK, we have quite a few 'on call' firefighters (about a third of the total) who are fully trained and are paid but are not full time. They typically work another job but are available during certain hours if required. I'm not sure if similar systems exist elsewhere.
A huge portion of the US is covered by purely volunteer fire departments. Communities pay for equipment and training and that is it. Response times are slow but it is really the only viable option in rural areas.
Not always slow. I had a kitchen fire at 4am from a microwave spontaneously combusting. Had the local deputy fire chief and local fire truck there within 15 minutes plus trucks from two other local towns.
At the federal level, FEMA and USDA offer extensive grants and low interest loans to fund fire districts in rural communities with a small tax base. I think basically every state offers similar funding assistance on top of that.
Looks like 80% of firefighters (or rescue personnel according to modern naming) in Finland are members of volunteer fire brigades or so-called contract fire brigades and they respond to nearly half of the total emergencies but over 90% of emergencies outside densely populated areas.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire
Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.
What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).
Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.
With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.
Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.
They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.
Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.
If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.
Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.
What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.
Not usually for anything over a few stories. Most of those taller buildings are a combination of masonry and steel. Steel started being used in the 1880s/1890s.
In my 4th floor apartment in Tokyo there was a box containing what seemed to be basically an abseiling harness. Instructions in Japanese but seemed like if shit hits the fan you smash the window, clip it to the building and get yourself down to street level asap.
Our AirBnB in Tokyo last year had a box mounted on the balcony which (according to the instructions on the outside) held some crane-like thing with a harness to let you swing out over the balcony and rappel down in the case of emergency.
My parents had something very similar to this in their apartment in the midwestern US in the 80s. I recall it as being an aluminum mount with a chain ladder.
Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.
The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.
In Japan, the main stairs of the building is designed like fire escapes. It is unenclosed and mostly on the side of the building. When I first saw them I thought it was silly to have the stairs open to the environment during rain and snow. I finally realized they have double purpose.
In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.
> The story of their decline is a fascinating case study in how building codes actually work. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.
... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.
> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.
Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.
Everything related to fires got better: more and better smoke and CO detectors, interior sprinklers, regulations around flammable clothes, bedding and mattresses, reduced smoking rates, increased awareness, faster response times, closure of firetrap rooming houses (fwiw: closing rooming houses contributes to the homelessness problem), better apartment inspections ...
We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
Redundancy matters when it protects from plausible issues.
> Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."
When power goes down, there is an immediate harm to patients. The grid downtime would need to be really implausible. Also, batteries would probably be okay now.
When fire happens - which is rarer now - it also rarer blocks the exit in a way that causes harm now.
Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.
Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.
(unless I Completely misunderstood)
External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago with existing buildings that were a fire trap and clearly better than nothing. However even then they knew they were not ideal.
And the problem with interior fire escape stairs was solved by encasing them in concrete and adding self-closing doors to prevent updrafts.
Them being bored is generally a good thing because it means the area is fairly safe, but that will tank their motivation I suppose.
I did call them once though - a post box was smoking. Possibly a device with a battery, or else someone putting fireworks or a cigarrete butt in them, who knows. But it gave the firemen something to do I suppose.
I've had friends that have been fire fighters and I think the burnout is real. They're not dealing with structure fires much anymore which is what a lot of their training deals with. Rather they do a lot of social work in the area taking care of the unhoused, disinfranchised, mentally disabled, etc... all while having this unique training.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything. They show up to random fender benders.
Aren't (many?) firefighters certified as paramedics?
Is that because the firefighters are bored or because they want to show the public that they're doing something valuable before the public realizes that we don't need so many of them?
Firefighters do a lot more than you probably realize. For instance, who is carrying grandma with her broken hip down the rickety stairs from her top floor bathroom? It's probably not just the two-person ambulance crew. You going to get grandpa to help?
These are the kinds of routine jobs that fire crews handle everyday that are invaluable to society.
I realize it which is why their strategy is a good one. Does it make sense for the people who are able to do that job also all be able to put out fires?
I think someone that can carry grandma down the stairs and also occasionally put out a catastrophic fire is a pretty reasonable and efficient use of taxpayer money. The alternative would be what, having two different people to do those things?
It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.
It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.
Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).
Where I live, the fire department has rescue trucks which sometimes can be large (like a ladder-less fire truck) but can also be as small as a heavy duty work truck. Some departments have enough money to have all kinds of various vehicles for special situations while other departments have just enough to own one vehicle to cover as many needs as possible. It would make more sense to buy something smaller but can they justify the cost to the county or city? And in cities, they still need the big ladder truck and likely need to host an ambulance in the station and probably a fire chief vehicle too. The money is limited as well as the space. I'm sure cities are already rethinking what they actually need now versus 50 years ago. I've already seen paramedic vehicles that are not ambulances, they look like a work van or truck, just enough for two paramedics and enough supplies to treat someone that doesn't need to immediately go to the hospital or to serve as an auxiliary during a mass casualty event. The truck is way cheaper than an ambulance.
The fire department should get a cheaper car for these calls then.
yes. they are edge cases but the training that comes with it translates fairly well to other tasks.
carrying grandma out of a burning building and carrying her downstairs after a fall are the same skill sets
So is powerlifting and ...?
Powerlifting doesn't teach you the technique and spotting required to walk backwards down a staircase while holding a stretcher above your head so that grandma, who is in extreme pain, doesn't slide off and tumble to the bottom.
Yup, had this exact scenario across the street last week.
The problem is that the need is spiky. You don't need many of them until an old apartment building or factory catches fire because of cladding made in the 70s.
They are like seat belts, or audit logs. You don't need so many of them, right up until you do.
Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.
On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.
We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.
Bold to say that in a forum of software developers, haha
Ouch :’(
I better go show up to metaphorical fender benders more
yeah sure, they're so bored they spend half their week cutting people out of their wrecked cars. Just to make you think their salary is justified
You might not need (say) 100 firefighters for the day to day work in a medium city any more... but you absolutely need 100 firefighters when the large chemical plant goes up in a blaze.
It's hard enough in Germany to balance that, but we at least can draw on the advantage of Germany being decently settled which means we can have support crews come in from neighboring cities. But in the US where it might be the case that the nearest city with enough staff is hours of driving away? By the time you get enough staff on site, the entire plant is gone.
I very rarely see actual candles being lit anymore. It's almost always fake candles with led lights.
We had this in NZ *years* ago at this point. Mate was a fire fighter for a few years (until his knees gave up, it's a brutal job) and he went to almost no actual fires. It was everything else.
> They show up to random fender benders.
EVs can cause pretty bad fires from benign looking accidents. Perhaps this is for the best? Better safe than sorry as they say.
Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
Firefighting is a a task with a pretty intrinsically bursty demand. You're employing them for the very peak of that demand and otherwise you want them working on relatively low priority things that can be dropped in an emergency.
In my town every firefighter is also an EMT and every fire truck has an AED and ventilation bag. And the local firehouse is invariably closer to basically everything than the ALS ambulance is.
So over the last several decades, "firefighter" has really just become emergency responder, where "emergency" can be a lot of things that happen in society pretty often.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
When there is a fire you still need enough at location in time.
The fact that there are enough in short distance with good equipment is one of the things which causes the low number of big fires: once the mandatory detector goes of for a little fire they are on site before it becomes big.
> Or perhaps we should dial back on how many firefighters we keep employed at all times.
The problem is you need a good number when there is a serious fire, even if it doesn't happen very often.
In the UK, we have quite a few 'on call' firefighters (about a third of the total) who are fully trained and are paid but are not full time. They typically work another job but are available during certain hours if required. I'm not sure if similar systems exist elsewhere.
A huge portion of the US is covered by purely volunteer fire departments. Communities pay for equipment and training and that is it. Response times are slow but it is really the only viable option in rural areas.
Not always slow. I had a kitchen fire at 4am from a microwave spontaneously combusting. Had the local deputy fire chief and local fire truck there within 15 minutes plus trucks from two other local towns.
At the federal level, FEMA and USDA offer extensive grants and low interest loans to fund fire districts in rural communities with a small tax base. I think basically every state offers similar funding assistance on top of that.
Looks like 80% of firefighters (or rescue personnel according to modern naming) in Finland are members of volunteer fire brigades or so-called contract fire brigades and they respond to nearly half of the total emergencies but over 90% of emergencies outside densely populated areas.
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire
Tell that to the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Fire escapes are an anachronism for buildings with a smaller footprint that aren't terribly high. Brownstones and smaller (older) apartment buildings in NYC are classic examples. Some of those buildings were also timber framed so having an external and secondary exit was imperative, particularly after major 19th century fire disasters.
What really happened is we started building concrete and steel core buildings that were particularly high so external fire escapes weren't really practical or necessary because the of the building height and the fact that modern buildings typically nearly always have multiple sets of stairs with fire doors, which saved a bunch of lives in one of the WTC towers on 9/11 but not the other (where all 4 staircases were breached).
Having a single point of egress is an incredibly bad idea as evidenced by Grenfell Tower.
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.
With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.
Firefighting in a large city versus a small town I assume are different, but the firefighters I know would never describe themselves as bored. They get paid to spend the majority of their time hanging out with friends, barbecuing, working on their cars, enjoying life, etc for the occasional hugely important and often terrifying life saving firefighting work.
They deploy more often than when I was a kid for EMT type work in place of or as first responder for ambulances. But, none of them would ever describe their day to day as boring.
[dead]
Interesting article.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.
Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.
If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.
A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...
Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.
What would burn in those manhattan buildings? Are the internal walls wood?
I don't know what would burn in the building I live in now. It's all cement construction. The internal walls are brick with gypsum over. The window coverings and furniture is flame resistant. I suppose I'd be screwed if my downstairs neighbor had a bunch of flammable stuff though. Also we have an underground parking lot full of cars... maybe I should invest in a ladder.
A old brick-wall building is basically a pretty shell protecting a wood frame.
Not usually for anything over a few stories. Most of those taller buildings are a combination of masonry and steel. Steel started being used in the 1880s/1890s.
The most essential unspoken purchase for anyone living higher than the ground floor in an older building is an emergency escape ladder.
Is that because a fire extinguisher is spoken or that it's not essential?
Is this really a phenomenon? Where and since when?
No one told me in either of my apartments.
In my 4th floor apartment in Tokyo there was a box containing what seemed to be basically an abseiling harness. Instructions in Japanese but seemed like if shit hits the fan you smash the window, clip it to the building and get yourself down to street level asap.
Our AirBnB in Tokyo last year had a box mounted on the balcony which (according to the instructions on the outside) held some crane-like thing with a harness to let you swing out over the balcony and rappel down in the case of emergency.
My parents had something very similar to this in their apartment in the midwestern US in the 80s. I recall it as being an aluminum mount with a chain ladder.
I remember those often being mentioned in “keep your home prepared in case of fire” educational materials, too. I’ve just never actually seen one.
Wood is a great construction material. It has better insulation value than brick, and the CO2 costs are vastly better.
Your flame resistant furniture will pyrolize just fine once the apartment gets hot enough. Just takes one idiot keeping their budget lithium bike inside to ignite the whole mess--ask me how I know.
The construction is there to isolate suites and delay the spread, but don't kid yourself that a given suite doesn't contain enough fuel to have a major fire, given the right ignition source and tinder.
In Japan, the main stairs of the building is designed like fire escapes. It is unenclosed and mostly on the side of the building. When I first saw them I thought it was silly to have the stairs open to the environment during rain and snow. I finally realized they have double purpose.
In S. Korea almost all apartment buildings have their own escape lapel rope attached to the window and all have a fire proof blanket in the cabinet near the exit door.
> The story of their decline is a fascinating case study in how building codes actually work. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.
... who else immediately heard the signature melody of his intro after reading these words?! I certainly did.
> When New York City updated their building codes in 1968, exterior exits were officially prohibited for new construction.
Fascinatingly in Germany it is just the other way around. If you have an old building that was built before fire codes mandated two independent exits for every residential room, and the window cannot be reached by a fire ladder, you are mandated to retrofit an escape ladder if you do a renovation of the building.
[flagged]