The Great Escape

I have just been watching the local television news. Several people, including some children, have died in a house fire. Actually this time it was some flats, not a huge high rise but high enough so that the people were killed jumping from the windows.
There can't be many people who haven't imagined themselves in a burning building but how many go one step further and make provisions for their escape? It would seem, not many and my evidence for that is simply the relatively low number of escape ladders sold. When I went looking for a suitable roll out escape ladder for my loft conversion my builder's merchant told me that they had never been asked for one. This despite the fact that they sell any number of fire escape roof windows. The purchase of the means of escape window fulfills a legal requirement but the Building Regulations say nothing about where you should escape to. They might as well say 'Climb out of the window and plunge to your death'.

The notion is that you escape to the roof and hang around there until the fire brigade or a neighbour comes with a ladder. The building is designed to give you half an hour protection but this has proved to be a generous estimate in real fires. Building don't always burn the way they are predicted to burn in a laboratory. Clearly in the case of these people in the flats they had run out of time either because the building burned too fast or the fire brigade were not fast enough. Now I have every faith in all our emergency services and honestly believe them to be the finest, most professional in the world but I have seen them struggle to get up my road with cars parked on both sides. It is very difficult to get a fire engine up here and if we assume that they had a traffic free journey across town they may still have used up 15 minutes from the time they got the call and how long had the fire been burning before they were called. Even if the half hour is accurate by the time they arrive and get their ladders off they might be cutting it a bit fine. So if you were in that fire with flames licking your backside would you jump to almost certain death or wait to be burned alive?

The ladder cost me £80.00 and apart from a little practice run for my son it has sat in its red box under the window gathering dust. Long may it remain there.
The practice run was perhaps unnecessary but it was fun. When my son wanted to move up to the attic bedroom I told him that he couldn't go there unless he could use an escape ladder. He was only nine years old but I got him to roll the ladder out from the window, climb out of the window and down the ladder to the ground posing for photographs on the way. If he had fallen he might have been killed or maimed but he has good self-preservation instincts and a steady nerve.

For all I know he might have used that ladder more than he should have. Perhaps to escape to the disco when he should have been studying for GCSEs. The people who make the rules say that there is more risk in trying to escape down a ladder than there is in staying put and letting the experts give you that famous fireman's carry, but I would at least like the option of escape if things got too hot. It always pays to have a plan B.

Yet in all the loft conversions I have carried out over the years there is only one person who has ever taken me up on the option of a means of escape ladder and that person is my nephew who I had plenty of chance to nag. So what do other people think when they see a news story about people jumping to their deaths from burning buildings? Probably that it will never happen to them. The cemeteries are full of people who thought that.