“Sometimes I bang my head against a wall, just to feel how good it is when I stop.” I love the work you are doing with the codes, pictures and comments so don’t stop. Is there some additional way the resources directed to you in picture and text could become part of wider exposure to the public? This information you present should be in the hands and used by fire chiefs, fire inspection official, the men on the trucks, city code officials, building owners and their maintenance people just as easily as we who get your information on the internet. Examples are really powerful.

I used to teach Hospital employees building fire safety. It seemed like I was always fighting with people who did not want to make the effort to open or unlatch a door. I used the example of a Minneapolis fire to drive home the point about stairwell doors back when this was not as well regulated as it is today.

One winter evening on December 23, 1956, a fire broke out in a live Christmas tree at the ground level lobby of a 5 floor hospital. It quickly engulfed the lobby which in that era had some combustible paneling. There was an uninformed practice of blocking open all stair tower doors from the lobby to the 5th floor. Smoke billowed up the open stairwell and onto the patient floors. Staff on the second, fourth and fifth floors rushed to get the stair doors closed as smoke billowed out. The nurse on 3rd floor who went to close the 3rd floor door fell, fractured her skull. All 7 fatalities occurred on third floor. Twelve patients had to be evacuated by Fire Department using ladders covered with ice from the sleet storm in progress. “What has happened can happen again”.