The History of Fire Escapes
summary
Argues that New York’s long arc of disasters — from the 1835 and tenement blazes to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (146 dead) — shows fire escapes are a hacky afterthought and that real safety comes from building better failure domains. Gives concrete engineering analogs: interior fireproof partitions, a 444‑page fire code, and the SRE playbook of prevention detection isolation response. Recommends specific tools: canaries, health checks, automatic recovery, sharding, and regular drills like a “wheel of misfortune.”
AI-written summary · about
chapters (49)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:18Content
- 2:53New York
- 4:20Financial District
- 4:45Warehouses
- 6:14Fire departments
- 6:28aqueduct
- 6:50tenements
- 7:36tenement fires
- 8:45tenement laws
- 9:15draft rights
- 9:53rope ladder
- 10:07parachute
- 10:21cord rope
- 10:35Cape
- 11:00Rope
- 11:34Ropes
- 12:13Air Shafts
- 13:22Iron Fire escapes
- 14:12Cadman Plaza
- 15:17New Laws
- 16:06tenement regulation
- 17:37Newark Factory fire
- 18:36Lamp Factory fire
- 19:32The root cause
- 21:25Commission
- 22:07Fireproof Walls
- 22:42Failure Domains
- 23:21Computers
- 23:49Fire Escapes
- 25:24Reliability
- 26:29Software
- 28:50Humans vs Robots
- 29:18Smoke Alarms
- 29:57Oil Fires
- 30:25Automatic Recovery
- 31:16Stage 3 Fire
- 33:34Dont lock your fire exits
- 33:59Communicate outages earlier
- 34:12Document your exits
- 34:34Wheels of misfortune
- 35:22Fire deaths
- 35:58NYC Fire Code
- 36:22Other Codes
- 36:51Culver Risks Digest
- 37:33Certification
- 38:21John Kronus
- 40:17New York State
- 41:37Free smoke alarms
related talks
35mThe Limits of Safety Engineering and the Cinderblock Problem
30mFueling The Future: Building Robust Engines
40mY2K and Other Disappointing Disasters: Risk Reduction and Harm Mitigation
22mResilience Is Not Enough
03mDeveloping a Chaos Architecture Mindset
38mWhy software developers should build a resilience culture based on chaos engineering
28mWith great power comes great responsibility
20mFireside Chat with Dr. Richard Cook