I am going to remain Wordless about these photos, except to say THANK YOU to Brett Africk of CBORD, who not only sent me a batch of photos of an opening he saw during a recent hotel stay, but also went BACK to the hotel after he checked out to take a photo of the exit sign. Enjoy (and try not to cry when you see the problem).
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It looks like the active door has a top pivot problem. Bottom flush bolt is not active as there is no bracket in the bottom edge. (empty screw hole) I am guessing that they are hoping to classify the steel door with the low sign as the exit and not the double glass doors. We can’t tell from the reflection what shape the outer pair of vestibule doors are in. If it looks like a door, . . . If I were the AHJ, they would have 3 working days to be totally remedied or totally vacant. They would have the choice.
I’d like to do some ride-alongs with you. 🙂
– Lori
I’m guessing that this is a bad conversion from a lockable push/pull pair, to an exit only exit device. Emphasis on bad!
If only one door would be required to meet egress requirements, and some uses of the room would block the right-hand door,
but both doors were occasionally needed for purposes of moving equipment, how should such a scenario best be handled? While I agree with the general notion that something that looks like a door should be usable as a door, I find it hard to imagine situations in which the existence of the inactive leaf would materially impede egress when the active leaf is right next to it and only the active leaf has an “active” panic bar. Unless the room is occupied by only one person, I would not expect egress to be impaired by more than a second [if there are two people, I’d expect at least one to try the active leaf immediately, and then the person at the inactive leaf would follow the other person out]. If there’s only one person, that person might try the inactive leaf for a couple seconds before successfully using the active one, but I don’t think the notion of “If one door doesn’t work, try the other” constitutes special knowledge or effort.
This is obviously an in-house attempt to change the original function of the interior pair of entry doors of a vestibule. The original design was probably just a pair of push-pull doors having no security hardware. While their modification is probably a code violation, I do see a door through the glass in the top photo that has panic hardware and is probably a secondary exit through a stair well on the ground floor. Yes, the owner should have had a hardware consultant/contractor install code compliant hardware if their intent was to provie security, but I’m curious as to whether or not the required exit width has been satisfied by the door “through the glass”.