I had a very small kitchen fire some years ago.
All i can remember was how damagerous the smoke was and how crazy quick that smoke filled the room..
The fire wasn't the scary or dangerous part it was the smoke from it.
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Fire at Swiss ski resort bar
- Thread starter Bazzards
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I had a very small kitchen fire some years ago.
All i can remember was how damagerous the smoke was and how crazy quick that smoke filled the room..
The fire wasn't the scary or dangerous part it was the smoke from it.
I assisted in evacuating Bank station some years ago. A person was looking at the tube map on the platform with earphones in. I had put my hand on their arm to get their attention from the map. Then they told me to f off. Amazing
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Associate
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Yes I'm sure it's the smoke that kills most people, not the actual fire.
The case in point, that one stairwell would soon have become a chimney taking smoke and heat and much of the breathable oxygen with it. Life would be untenable very soon.
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Soldato
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It really speaks to modern culture that they got their phones out and started filming the fire, instead of leaving.
Like most people I suspect, I respond to the deaths of strangers quite unevenly. I found this incident particularly tragic. I like skiing and I used to like going to clubs, so I could easily picture this happening to a younger me. Furthermore my kids are mid-teens, so I can easily picture it being then in a few years. And then burning is just a horrible way to die (and sometimes horrific to survive).
Man of Honour
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Depends what you call modern.
It was the early 2000s and camera/video phones were a thing but had got to be before Facebook (2007?).
Me and my mate came across a crashed car on it's side with 4x people in it, he's a professional Nurse, I had training and we set about dealing with it.
At least 20 people surrounded us taking photo's or videos and I had to scream at people to get help but they're all looking at me as though I'm mad.
Eventually I did it myself because all they were interested in was getting better angles etc.
It has got worse since then obviously.
Soldato
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Booze and likely a fair amount of drugs do tend to affect our sense of danger.
Soldato
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I and my friends did some ridiculously stupid things when we were young and under the influence and this was the 89/90s. Young people, especially men are often drawn to danger when under the influence in my experience. We just see it all recorded today.
As does simply being in a situation where you expect to be safe and are faced with something unusual.
It takes time for the brain to process, especially when you're not expecting anything to go wrong and you might be unusure initially what is going on.
I remember the IRA bomb threats and police having stories of people trying to ignore the instruction to leave the area, or wanting to continue shopping.
At the best of times people tend to be bad at assessing personal risks in unusual situations or when they've not experienced it before (one of the reasons for the "stupid H&S required training" in many jobs).
As SGF says, this isn't something new, it's been going on for decades even when people are sober and have had very clear, very precise instructions and warnings and given hours of notice people often won't start to act until it's too late.
The standing watching rather than helping/reacting thing, often at risk to yourself is also one of the reasons police sometimes close down the opposite side of a motorway to an accident, or will slow traffic right down even if there are no emergency staff on that side, they know from prior experience that people will start watching the accident as opposed to the road and end up causing another accident because they've got interested in it and are now ignoring their own situation.
Soldato
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Copied from elsewhere but it’s a good take:
The Station Nightclub fire happened in 2003. No smartphones. No Instagram.
100 people still died because they stood watching the flames, thinking it was part of the show.
I've retrofitted fire safety for some of the largest property portfolios in the UK post-grenfell.
You are confusing stupidity with biology, physics, and catastrophic design failures.
Here is the actual science of what you are watching:
1. When the music keeps playing and staff don't panic, the human brain overrides flight instincts to fit the threat into a normal context. This is called normalcy bias. These kids froze to process conflicting social cues, not to post for likes. They were likely already filming. They were also likely drunk.
2. We explicitly design buildings to account for this hesitation (pre-movement time). Fire safety codes assume people will wait before running. In a compliant building, you can assume up to a minute or two before egress commences. Sprinklers and detection systems are designed specifically to buy that time.
3. The reason the time buffer didn't exist here is the material. That ceiling is polyurethane foam. It doesn't burn linearly; it hits flashover (1,100°F) in under 90 seconds. It's essentially solid gasoline. The room would have exploded for all intents and purposes. Way before anyone could reasonably evacuate.
4. We calculate exit widths based on how many people can physically pass through a door per minute (flow rate) versus how fast a fire spreads. With foam fires, the available safe egress time drops to almost zero. Even if they had reacted instantly, the crowd density would have choked the exits before the room cleared.
5. In any normal building fire, especially one that starts off small, you expect a responsible adult to put it out, or sprinklers to do the same. When there's a pan fire in a restaurant, you don't run out in case the entire building suddenly explodes. No reasonable person should have expected this unless they were the owner and knew how the building was designed.
Those poor teenagers likely passed out from smoke inhalation soon after this video. If they didn't, they would have been caught in a catastrophic explosion as they crammed into the single tiny exit.
They didn't die because of Instagram.
They died because the physics of the fire moved faster than human bodies can physically squeeze through a door, and a catastrophic disregard of safe design principles meant they never stood a chance.
The Station Nightclub fire happened in 2003. No smartphones. No Instagram.
100 people still died because they stood watching the flames, thinking it was part of the show.
I've retrofitted fire safety for some of the largest property portfolios in the UK post-grenfell.
You are confusing stupidity with biology, physics, and catastrophic design failures.
Here is the actual science of what you are watching:
1. When the music keeps playing and staff don't panic, the human brain overrides flight instincts to fit the threat into a normal context. This is called normalcy bias. These kids froze to process conflicting social cues, not to post for likes. They were likely already filming. They were also likely drunk.
2. We explicitly design buildings to account for this hesitation (pre-movement time). Fire safety codes assume people will wait before running. In a compliant building, you can assume up to a minute or two before egress commences. Sprinklers and detection systems are designed specifically to buy that time.
3. The reason the time buffer didn't exist here is the material. That ceiling is polyurethane foam. It doesn't burn linearly; it hits flashover (1,100°F) in under 90 seconds. It's essentially solid gasoline. The room would have exploded for all intents and purposes. Way before anyone could reasonably evacuate.
4. We calculate exit widths based on how many people can physically pass through a door per minute (flow rate) versus how fast a fire spreads. With foam fires, the available safe egress time drops to almost zero. Even if they had reacted instantly, the crowd density would have choked the exits before the room cleared.
5. In any normal building fire, especially one that starts off small, you expect a responsible adult to put it out, or sprinklers to do the same. When there's a pan fire in a restaurant, you don't run out in case the entire building suddenly explodes. No reasonable person should have expected this unless they were the owner and knew how the building was designed.
Those poor teenagers likely passed out from smoke inhalation soon after this video. If they didn't, they would have been caught in a catastrophic explosion as they crammed into the single tiny exit.
They didn't die because of Instagram.
They died because the physics of the fire moved faster than human bodies can physically squeeze through a door, and a catastrophic disregard of safe design principles meant they never stood a chance.
People are so used to it being 'just a drill'.
Soldato
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It was the same in the 80s.
I remember my dad finding a girl who'd cut her wrists (still alive) and he was getting the knife off her, then restraining her. There was quite a crowd watching. He called them vampires and told them to xxxx off (one of the few times I ever heard him swear). Most of them stayed to watch, my mum rushed us home and phoned 999...
It was the same in the 80s.
I remember my dad finding a girl who'd cut her wrists (still alive) and he was getting the knife off her, then restraining her. There was quite a crowd watching. He called them vampires and told them to xxxx off (one of the few times I ever heard him swear). Most of them stayed to watch, my mum rushed us home and phoned 999...
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Similar with my dad - came across an incident involving a car and there was a crowd of people who'd done absolutely nothing but gawp, my dad had a few choice words for them (first and I think only time I've heard him swear), only one other person did anything who arrived slightly before we did.
IMO goes a lot deeper, it is unbelievable these days how many people don't care about things like for example leaving fire escapes unblocked - until something happens and then they tend to go over the top the other way...
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Man of Honour
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Playing in bands we often get thrown up a corner where there will be a fire door.
In 55 years of gigging I can only remember a couple of times when we've been ordered to keep the door clear, all the other times in any band I've been in we've kept a path clear to the door.
So much for that assertation from the mayor, I did think something was going to come about the fire inspections
New info on BBC live feed
They expanded the terrace. That was checked. Council dropped the ball not doing a full inspection again plus any follow up inspections for the 5 additional years. They are just as responsible if not more than the owners.