A fire escape is a special kind of emergency exit, usually mounted to the outside of a building or occasionally inside. It provides a method of escape in the event of a fire or other emergency that makes the stairwells inside a building inaccessible. Fire escapes most often found on multiple-story residential buildings, such as apartment buildings.
About Fire escape in brief
A fire escape is a special kind of emergency exit, usually mounted to the outside of a building or occasionally inside. It provides a method of escape in the event of a fire or other emergency that makes the stairwells inside a building inaccessible. Fire escapes are most often found on multiple-story residential buildings, such as apartment buildings. At one time, they were a very important aspect of fire safety for all new construction in urban areas. More recently, however, they have fallen out of common use. This is due to the improved building codes incorporating fire detectors, technologically advanced fire fighting equipment, and more importantly fire sprinklers. A fire escape consists of a number of horizontal platforms, one at each story of aBuilding, with ladders or stairs connecting them. The platform and stairs are usually open steel gratings, to prevent the build-up of ice, snow, and leaves. Railings are usually provided on each of the levels, but as fire escapes are designed for emergency use only, these railings often do not need to meet the same standards as railings in other contexts.
The ladder from the lowest level of the fire escape to the ground may be fixed, but more commonly it swings down on a hinge or slides down along a track. An alternate form of rapid-exit fire escape developed in the early 1900s was a long canvas tube suspended below a large funnel outside the window of a tall building. This escape tube could be rapidly deployed from a window and hung down to street level, though it was large and bulky to store inside the building. A modern type of evacuation slide is the vertical spiral escape chute, which is a common means of evacuation for buildings and other structures. As many fire escapes were built before the advent of electronic fire alarms, fire escapes in older buildings have often needed to be retrofitted with alarms.
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This page is based on the article Fire escape published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
