>> good afternoon, i'm lawrence kornfield. welcome to our brown bag lunch. the fire department as a lot to do with fire escapes in san

francisco. we have tens of thousands of fire escapes in san francisco. it's sort of like utility wires, until you start looking for them. you don't even see them. today we're going to look at them and for them and talk a little bit about what they are there for and how they should be maintained. what our standards are. so we are right here in front of building services office at 1660 mission street. we have one of many buildings served by fire escapes. they are typically used when there's a required means of existing or egressfrom the building. this building has a main stairway and all these fire escapes. i don't know about the backside. it probably has more exits that

would be typically required to have. >> typically fire escapes are the second. the first is for existing buildings. my guess is the building has been broken up. that's why they add more than one fire escape. >> and in fact one of basis of the building code is to get people how the. how do you get people out safely? >> right and the cold always says, if one is blocked there should be another one in 99 percent of buildings >> and there are limitations on how you exit. you can't exit from one tenant space to another if that space is locked. that's why we have extra fire escapes on this building. let's look up at these fire escapes for a second. the fire escapes have a few

specific elements. and we'll talk in detail about what they are. they include a way out on top fire escape balcony. the fire escape balconies. the ladder from the lowest balcony to the ground and a way to get on to the roof. i think those are the main elements of the fire escape. >> yeah. >> okay. and we're going to look at a bunch of different ones. this is a good example across the street. so first of all, how do you get out on to the fire escape? you can't have to climb out on a little window. we can see there are large, openable window pain doors,

>> they did allow them to climb out windows and those are grandfathered in. >> as bill mentioned, there's an important part of the codes, they are not retroactive. you had to bring them up to today's standards. it's allowed to be maintained in the original construction. that's one of reasons we have old fire escapes. they are not required to be upgraded. >> if this was built today, a fire escape would not be allowed. they do not meet the second means of egresscode.

>> but in all the existing ones like this one, you have to maintain them and keep a second means. according to the codes the building was built under. we are allowed to have fire escapes in existing buildings to provide a new exist from a historic building. it specifically allows fire escapes. we are allowed to have fire escapes for new exits. it's under some circumstances >> right. r3. one and 2 family homes. even new ones, which is not under the jurisdiction of the fire department. we will allow new buildings to have fire escapes if they can show reasonable standard for why they cannot put in a conforming stair y.