Chicago high rise fire case study

High-rises not alike in fire safety Standards, evacuation drills vary By Rachel Osterman and Jon Yates Tribune staff reporters Published October 26, 2003 The fire was so close, workers could see the plumes of smoke from their windows in the upper floors of the office buildings along North LaSalle Street. It was, for some, an unsettling sight. Inside the frosted green windows at 200 N. LaSalle, building manager James Runnion said he began to wonder about the safety of his 30-story building, home to more than 1,500 workers. Next door, at 180 N. LaSalle, employees said they thumbed through their evacuation plans, some discovering startling similarities between their building and the one at 69 W. Washington St., where locked stairwell doors and a lack of sprinklers might have contributed to the deaths of six workers. "If there were a fire, I don't know the best way out of here and I guarantee you no one else in my office does either," said Charlie Beaupre, who works on the 31st floor at 180 N. LaSalle. "When it happens two blocks away, it makes you think." Four buildings on the west side of LaSalle, picked at random by the Tribune, show how buildings vary greatly when it comes to fire safety features and basic evacuation drills. While some of the high-rises are fortified with the most advanced fire protection systems, others lag behind, and one--180 N. LaSalle--legally lacks sprinklers on many of its floors. The four buildings represent the uneven regulations that apply to buildings in Chicago, many of which are not required to meet the same codes as newly constructed buildings. The pattern is repeated throughout the Loop and across the city, where structures mere feet from each other often are home to vastly different safety features. In many cases, the key difference is whether the building was constructed before or after 1975, when Chicago enacted tougher fire safety rules. Starting that year, all high-rises 80 feet and taller were required to install stairwell doors that can be unlocked by remote, a voice communication system and heat detectors. Perhaps most important, the city also began requiring newly constructed buildings to install sprinklers, a safety feature experts say is vitally important in fighting fires. According to Robert Solomon, vice president of the Quincy, Mass.-based National Fire Protection Association, there has not been a single fatality in a fully sprinklered building since his group began keeping fire statistics in 1920. The 1975 code change requiring sprinklers did not affect buildings built before that year, meaning the level of fire protection in a Chicago high-rise often depends on the year in which it was built. The 38-story high-rise at 180 N. LaSalle was constructed in 1972. While it does have an evacuation plan and is equipped with fire hoses, alarms and a communications system, it is not required to have some key elements in fire suppression. Although some of the floors in the building have since been renovated to include sprinklers, most of the upper floors do not have them. For some workers in the building, however, it is not the lack of sprinklers that worries them--it's the fact that stairwell doors lock when they are shut and cannot be reopened by remote control. In the Oct. 17 fire at the Cook County Administration Building, some of the workers who rushed down stairs to escape the smoke say they were sent back up by arriving firefighters. When they went back up, they found locked doors that trapped them in a smoky stairwell. All six who died that day were killed by smoke inhalation, and all six were found in a stairwell. On the 20th floor of the building at 180 N. LaSalle, a sign outside the stairway door says the steps exit only to the first floor. "Once you're in it, you're stuck," said Ky Killmaster, who works on the 20th floor at the Illinois State Board of Investment office. Kristin Holmberg, who works at Anthem Group on the 10th floor, said she has spoken to the building's managers about the locking doors and has been told they're looking into it. "I hadn't thought about it until Friday," Holmberg said. "If the same situation happened here and the firemen told us to go up, we'd be trapped." The building's management company, Prime Group Realty Trust, declined requests for comment. Others, however, have recommended a change in city law that would require buildings constructed before 1975 to install devices that would automatically unlock stairwell doors in an emergency. The Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago called the measure a "common sense means of ensuring safe and orderly emergency evacuations." The association does not support a proposal by Ald. Edward Burke (14th) that would require that all pre-1975 high-rise buildings install sprinklers. The building association said such a change could be cost-prohibitive and that many buildings do not have adequate standpipes and water supplies. Still, two of the buildings the Tribune examined are more than 70 years old, and both have added sprinklers. The state-owned Michael A. Bilandic Building at 160 N. LaSalle, constructed in 1920, installed sprinklers a decade ago, along with stairway doors that automatically unlock in an emergency, and an exhaust system that pulls smoke away from the stairwells. The 21-story office building holds safety drills twice a year--enough to put many workers' minds at ease. "I feel so safe I don't even think about it," said Terri Negovan, an administrative assistant who works in the building. Negovan can't fathom a catastrophe in her building like the one on Oct. 17, two blocks away. "Here, I don't think that would have happened because they're on the ball," she said. "Here they know the procedures so well." Three buildings down, at 222 N. LaSalle, the owners added sprinklers to the 77-year-old high-rise during a renovation in 1985. The stairwells have electronic locks that automatically release during an emergency, and firefighters can manually pressurize individual stairwells and floors within the 26-story structure, which clears smoke from the stairs. Of the buildings examined, one of the most elaborate safety systems is inside the building at 200 N. LaSalle, a 30-story glass-and-steel high-rise built in 1984, almost a decade after the city's new codes went into effect. There are sprinklers on every floor, stairway doors automatically unlock when an alarm goes off and if a fire breaks out, the building's exhaust system kicks in, stopping air from coming into the building and pushing the smoke out. A communications system allows emergency crews to make announcements throughout the building, and intercoms in the stairwells allow employees to call down to the lobby. It has all the bells and whistles of a modern skyscraper, but the Oct. 17 fire at the county administration building was still frightening enough to convince the general manager, James Runnion, to conduct an emergency check last week. With the building virtually empty at 7 a.m. Tuesday, Runnion tested the system in a simulated fire. It worked perfectly, he said, a message that was spread among the buildings' tenants. Joey Williams, who works in 200 N. LaSalle, said he has no worries. "At first, when I heard about the fire and thought about it, I was like `Oh, God, what if it happened to us?'" he said. "But then I remembered how on top of it the building is here."

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune