The Fire Code: A Tool Against Terrorism

Chicago, IL—On Dec. 1, 1958, at approximately 2 p.m., a fire broke out in the basement of the Our Lady of the Angels (OLA) Catholic grade school. The fire started in a basement trash container near one of the stairwells and went unnoticed for approximately 20–30 minutes before a window failed. Fueled by a new air supply, the fire exploded up the wooden staircase. A first-floor fire door blocked the fire. The second floor, however, had no fire door. The highly combustible school became a deathtrap within minutes.

The fire and smoke engulfed the second-floor classrooms and roof area. Many students and teachers, realizing they were trapped, chose to stay put, pray and hope to be rescued by the fire department. Little did they know firefighters were misdirected to the rectory a block away and were working feverishly to break through an 8-foot fence to access the property.

The Chicago Fire Department made a valiant effort to fight the fire and made dozens of rescues in the process. However, despite their heroics, the death toll would eventually total 92 students and three teachers. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the OLA fire ranks as the third worst school fire in American history. It remains a seminal event in the annals of the American fire service.

OLA aftermath

By all accounts, the Our Lady of the Angels school was legally in compliance with the fire code at the time of the fire. The school had been grandfathered in the 1949 fire standards and reportedly passed a fire safety inspection only a few weeks before the fire.

As with most tragedies, after the fire, the public was outraged and demanded action. There were sweeping changes made to fire codes nationwide—sprinklers, alarms, firewalls, noncombustible construction, emergency lighting, training and inspections all became standard, as did strict enforcement of existing codes. These changes had the desired effect. According to the NFPA, since the OLA tragedy, no school fire in America has claimed more than 10 lives.

Columbine tragedy

Like the Our Lady of the Angels fire, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre was a defining moment in American law enforcement history. After Columbine, everything changed. Police no longer wait for SWAT teams to assemble when there is an active shooter incident. Instead of forming a perimeter and effecting containment, police move in on the shooter immediately. The current strategy is to find and neutralize the shooter(s) as quickly as possible. These tactics seek to 1) deny shooter(s) the ability to kill scores of defenseless people before police SWAT units can get to the scene and to 2) confine the shooter to as small an area as possible. EMS wants to access victims as soon as possible to stop traumatic bleeding and save savable lives. EMS and law enforcement’s evolving attitudes on active shooter situations hasn’t carried over to the fire service, though. It’s as if the fire service is still trying to figure out where we fit in during these events.

In 1966, Charles Whitman staged his infamous shooting rampage from the observation deck of the University of Texas-Austin campus tower. Since then, there have been at least 40 mass shootings at American schools. Since the OLA fire, nearly 450 students have been murdered in school-related shootings in the United States. Times and society have changed.

Changing times

The American fire service is facing a new type of threat. Collectively, we need to realize that we’ve largely eliminated the threat of large loss-of-life fires in school buildings and in most other public assembly buildings where fire and life safety codes are present and enforced. However, while one threat has been diminished, another is looming large.

The active shooter threat has evolved and is compounded today by the scourge of terrorism. Whether it’s a random student who has decided to settle a score with a classmate for some real or imagined reason or terrorists looking for a soft target, the threats of active shooters in our schools and other places of work and assembly aren’t going away any time soon.

The question for American emergency services is how do we deal with this threat? I believe we can look to our past for cues in how we deal with this issue. It’s time for the fire service to reexamine our fire and life safety codes for help.

Codes make a difference

Fire codes make a point to address features such as entrances and exits from rooms, buildings and stair towers, and the doors that are used to secure them. Features like crash bars and direction of swing as well as materials used in door construction are all subjects for examination and deliberation when writing or amending a fire code. When we’re talking about fires, we understandably want to ensure people can get OUT of a building as quickly as possible.

But what if the threat isn’t from fire? What if, as in the case of an active shooter, having large masses of people crowding into confined hallways and moving all at once is potentially the worst thing we could do? In that case, the fire code fails us. Simply pulling the fire alarm in a high-rise tower, for instance, could unlock every door in the building (or at least the stair towers). This feature, which is meant to give free, unrestricted passage to firefighters and responders, can also be exploited by shooters looking for victims. It also channels victims into predictable avenues of travel where they can be intercepted and harmed. A deranged employee would typically know where everyone assembles in an emergency. Our fire drills and, predictability, a core of our fire safety standard operating procedures (SOPs) can, in times of terrorist attack, be fatally flawed.

Active shooters and terrorists want to gain access to as many defenseless victims as quickly as possible. As soon as a shooter is discovered the clock begins to tick. They know the police will be responding and history shows us they have in most cases about 15 minutes to live. Therefore, our strategy should be to impede their rampage for as long as possible while keeping them contained to areas where law enforcement can quickly find and subdue them.

To some extent, we’re already familiar with this process. When we have a fire in a high-rise building, we don’t immediately evacuate it. We urge occupants to “shelter in place” until the situation is assessed. Occupants are told to move into the fire towers that are essentially fire proof safe spaces. We need to apply this same thinking to when an active shooter appears.

Doors that are designed to be easily opened for egress in case of a fire must now be secured from the INSIDE to prevent the shooter from accessing civilians. I suggest that classroom or assembly occupancy doors should be equipped or otherwise permitted by code to use external hardware that, in times of crisis, allows occupants to secure themselves inside until the threat has been mitigated. Where restricted now, exemptions should be granted. The use of panic hardware and/or secure doors, coupled with internal communications, electronic social media alerts, drills and other security systems/hardware, can help reduce the number of victims lost in active shooter attacks. Further, active shooter training should also become as commonplace as fire drills or, as during the Cold War, atomic bomb drills.

Familiar territory

This concept is not altogether alien to the fire service. The shooter must move through a space in search of victims, just like firefighters. As soon as the shooter is in evidence and the alarm is raised, everyone in the building immediately secures their rooms until the all clear is given. Locking shooters OUT of various spaces forces them to stay in hallways and common areas where they can be more easily identified and engaged by police. The shooter must decide to either try to defeat a door or move on to look for easier targets. As rooms are secured, the odds of further killing goes down.

Our goal here is the same as our fire service mantra: AREA of origin, ROOM of origin, FLOOR of origin and BUILDING of origin. By making a shooter defeat multiple barriers and security doors starting at every entrance to a building, we actively delay their efforts to kill. The fire service deals with security doors in various buildings every day, so this should not be a cause to reject this premise. Government buildings, for example, often have multiple levels of security that need to be relaxed when firefighters arrive on location.

Understandably, locked doors are loathed by firefighters. History has shown us that many people have lost their lives because of one locked door or blocked, or even overcrowded, exits. However, we’re talking about a new and distinct threat that causes us to adapt and overcome. There are few doors (or even walls) a well-trained fire crew can’t breech. The concept of safe rooms is nothing new; we use them now in various forms. Adjusting our thinking is what’s hard. Wired glass in classroom doors may hold in place when impinged by fire, but is that a serious consideration in a sprinkler-equipped building of concrete construction? A well-constructed fire door without glass that can be locked from the inside is a better all-around solution.

In sum

Today many government safety lessons urge people to RUN, HIDE or FIGHT when confronted by an active shooter. The thought of little children desperately trying to pile desks in front of their classroom doors as a shooter closes in worries me to no end. How many lives could have been saved in Newtown, CT, if the teachers simply had the ability and training to secure the classroom doors, making them essentially safe rooms? It’s time to look to our past, understand the lessons we’ve already paid for in blood, and apply those lessons to minimize future losses.