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Multi-family now with only one stairway access

I'm not really concerned. Building design, fire suppression, etc. have come light years since the dual-stair requirement came to life 100+ years ago, and that requirement is generally unique to the U.S. and Canada while the rest of the world has cruised along fine without it. New York City, Seattle, and Honolulu have had exceptions forever, and two of those have higher risk from seismic.
 
jumbach said:
I would not like this. What if the fire is between my unit and the only stairs??
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If you're in a new building, most of the country is covered by modern building/fire codes requiring full fire suppression throughout an entire multi-family building.

You'd likely be very safe, provided the building's systems are properly maintained and functional.
 
I (now) live in an upper flat with both a front and rear stairwell. Pretty much, every two-flat in metro Buffalo has two stairwells.

My landlord asked me why I use the front stairs so much. After being out of the area for so long, I don't think that front doors are only there for papal visits.
 
We're finally starting to see engineering homework come in on the single-stair midrise topic:


That said, the recommendations the WJE/Crux crew arrived at are quite interesting: either corridor smoke detection or beefed-up sprinkler & fire door ITM would get you to an equi-risk point with single-stair lowrise by their methodology, but they don't seem to see value in widening the stairwell, unlike the BCBC single stair amendment working group report, although the folks in BC weren't operating at such a quantitative level.

Furthermore, my personal takeaways from the report, albeit not explicitly indicated in it are that:
  1. There needs to be better research on and approaches to fire door performance in multifamily buildings. Not only did the lack of data prevent the WJE/Crux folks from drawing any quantitative conclusion about fire door ITM or design improvements, but the report's egress modeling really hammers home just how vital proper fire door configuration, ITM, and operation are to life safety in large conventional multifamily structures, where the abuse of a $2 wedge to defeat a fire door's self-closing function can put hundreds of occupants at significant risk of entrapment should a fire start. It even raises the question "should we be studying the use of delayed-action closers, scanner-closer-holders, and/or automatic-closing mechanisms instead of pure self-closing on fire doors in the multifamily context, given that "failure to close" seems to be the common failure mode for fire doors?"
  2. Corridors, it turns out, are a vital compartmentalization component in single-stair buildings as the requirement for a second fire door to fail in order for the stair to become unusable seems to significantly reduce the risk to floors other than the floor of fire origin in a single-stair building.

(Sidenote: single-stair lowrise multifamily has been in the Codes for many moons and doesn't seem to have a particularly bad track record compared to other types of multifamily buildings, which is part of the reason why the WJE/Crux study uses a reference Code single-stair building as their risk benchmark for single-stair midrise configurations.)
 
SlaveToTheGrind said:
I see a safety problem.

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I just had this conversation with our building official and our fire marshal a couple of weeks ago. We are changing our code with the next update this summer to allow for things like this. There will be interior design requirements and internal firewall requirements, but the big element will be the maximum distance from any point to the stairwell and the stairwell cannot have anything farmable.
 
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