I don't get involved with residential construction very often, but a local locksmith recently asked about the use of double-cylinder deadlocks on single family homes. His position is that he will not install them, but he was looking for a code reference to back him up.
A couple of weeks ago someone asked me whether the exterior exit doors for a movie theater required panic hardware, and in my opinion, the answer is a resounding YES! Movie theaters are considered assembly occupancies, and the occupant load is well over the limit (50 or 100 occupants depending on the code) that would require panic hardware.
Next Tuesday is the proposal closing date for the 2013 editions of NFPA 80 - Standard for Fire Doors and Other Opening Protectives, and NFPA 105 - Standard for the Installation of Smoke Door Assemblies and Other Opening Protectives.
I recently received this photo from Michael Wojnarowski of Builders Hardware, and it reminded me of a Powerpoint presentation I ran across a while back. The presentation was created by the Anne Arundel County Fire Marshal Division - Code Enforcement Bureau, and the topic is Maverick Bars.
"It's not what you know, it's who you know..."
I saw this door at a restaurant today. The decor is meant to look like a garage, and it's pretty cool - I especially liked the naked closers. I did wonder about the main entrance door though. It's tough to tell from the photos, but the graphics from the wall run over the aluminum portions of the door and frame and across the glass, so the glass is tinted orange with the dark stripes running across. You can barely see the word "extra" on the glass at the top of the door, but look at the window on the side of the vestibule - it's the same treatment that's on the door. When I looked at it from my seat it looked dark orange just like the wall.
I spent most of today traveling to Connecticut to do a Code Jeopardy presentation for 31 building inspectors there. I'm pretty sure they thought I was crazy when I said that we were going to play a game, but they enjoyed it and learned something, and I was able to keep them awake even though they had just eaten a big slab of meatloaf. If you want to learn about codes in a fun an interactive way, let me know and I'll try to arrange Code Jeopardy for your group.
There have been lots of changes around here in the last few months...we moved the site to a new server and a new URL, and things seem to be running smoothly. We've added an archive in the sidebar, and reformatted the search results pages and the category index pages to match. My coworker, Lindsey Weiss, has spent many hours checking each post for broken links and posts that were missing the 2009 code excerpts, as well as updating the photo gallery. She's in the process of checking the categories assigned to each post, so the correct posts show up on each category index page. I'm very grateful to Lindsey for helping me clean up my act, and for Creekside Systems for working behind the scenes. I hope these changes will help you find things and navigate around on the site more easily.
I just noticed an article in the Edinburgh Evening News that was worth sharing. No, I don't make a habit of reading Scottish newspapers, but thanks to Google I see all kinds of news items involving fire doors.
A few weeks ago I did a post about egress from an occupied roof, and that reminded me to go back and dig out some courtyard photos I took a while ago. When a courtyard is completely enclosed with no means of egress that leads directly to a public way, the path of egress is typically into the building and then out again through the building's egress doors.
