What gear for high-rise building emergency escape?

Hate to be a wet blanket but most High rise windows do not open. In the City where I work Some windows are made from tempered glass so that they can be safely broken. Breaking out regular non tempered glass can be fatal to people on the ground.

Finding an anchor point to rappel from will be problematic. Bottom line use the stairs even though they are crowded. study the building learning all stairways. Some will go to the roof some won't.

Get out of the building, don't relocate to a lower floor GET OUT.

Buy Life Insurance.
 
It's possible to set up a lower cost bailout kit. Here is the kit I have put together to get myself out of a building quickly should things start to go bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ue-mk9Yt0E

The yellow hook is my anchor and it is just hooked in the corner of the window and is held in place by my weight while descending. My descent device is preconnected to my escape belt. All I have to do is find an anchor and go.
This is the setup I recommend (and sell) when I teach emergency bailout with my business.

FWIW, there are is 5mm cordage, about the same size as 550 cord, that is rated to 5000 lbs. It's small and strong, but man is it expensive.

Stay Safe
 
Good thoughts on this thread. Prybar, smoke hood, flashlight, water.

If you plan on rapelling, proper gear, and go around the floor pre-identifying your anchor points. Then you can anchor away from the fire. Train, then place fresh gear where you know it is safe. I rapelled a lot in the Army, tried it a few years ago after a long layoff. It's very easy, just like riding a bike. You can get down 120' in far less time than it takes to type this reply.

A 12 story building surrounded by skyscrapers probably won't be a target unless accidental. I would worry about fire. I work in a 13 story building, and the procedure is to set off the alarms on the floor in question, and the floors above and below it. So you have to get down 4 stories.

Having said all that, with modern sprinkler systems, I wouldn't be terribly concerned. The buildings are concrete and steel, and the only flammable things are the rugs, furniture, paper, etc. Without all the jet fuel that 9/11 pumped into the building, I seriously doubt it would collapse, and the sprinkers should slow the fire down to give you time to boogie down the stairs.

Volunteer to be one of the fire marshals for your floor. Get to know the building and the procedures really well.
 
dcfireman said:
It's possible to set up a lower cost bailout kit. Here is the kit I have put together to get myself out of a building quickly should things start to go bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ue-mk9Yt0E

The yellow hook is my anchor and it is just hooked in the corner of the window and is held in place by my weight while descending. My descent device is preconnected to my escape belt. All I have to do is find an anchor and go.
This is the setup I recommend (and sell) when I teach emergency bailout with my business.

FWIW, there are is 5mm cordage, about the same size as 550 cord, that is rated to 5000 lbs. It's small and strong, but man is it expensive.

Stay Safe
Click to expand...

That is COOL! You got a web site?
 
Thank you very much! I love teaching technical rescue, particularly rope based training as well as firefighter survival. This bailout system combines the two... heaven! My website is www.rescue2training.com.

Thanks for letting me get in a plug.
 
dcfireman said:
It's possible to set up a lower cost bailout kit. Here is the kit I have put together to get myself out of a building quickly should things start to go bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ue-mk9Yt0E

The yellow hook is my anchor and it is just hooked in the corner of the window and is held in place by my weight while descending. My descent device is preconnected to my escape belt. All I have to do is find an anchor and go.
Click to expand...

That looks impressive, DCFireman. What do you use for each component (assuming it's not a proprietary secret)? Like, what descender, what cordage? Etc.?
 
Good thoughts, Sodak--I'm not hugely worried about airliner attacks on my building (for exactly the reasons you mention); more, it's just the fact that I'm going to be in a little concrete box 12 stories up. I'm trying to teach myself to notice every time I walk into an unsurvivable-unless-the-electricity-works environment, just because. Which is, I'd suggest, a kind of situational awareness that might be near the top of any list of survival must-haves. Not that I'm too great at this, but I'm trying to improve.

I'm guessing fire is my likeliest danger there--maybe followed by some kind of bad-guy-decides-to-shoot-folks scenario. (My government boss sometimes gets unpopular with bad guys.) Still, I'd like to have a "plan B" for getting out (e.g., in the event of fire.) (Or, worse, whatever other scenario I haven't even thought to plan for, but the possibility for which is inherent in working on floor 12 of anywhere.)
 
Oh: BNielsen wisely notes that not all high-rise glass is the same. I remember, decades ago, my dad (who worked in one of the local taller skyscrapers) pointed out to me that some, but not most, of the windows in his building had orange dots, maybe 3 inches in diameter, in the lower corners. These, he explained to me, indicated that the windows were tempered so as to shatter into lots of tiny pieces if hit by a bullet--the idea being that, in an emergency, the cops would shoot out those particular windows, I guess sparing the folks on the ground the problem of dodging large guillotine-blade-like pieces of broken glass. Interesting.

What I wonder, I guess, is this: what kind(s) of glass am I looking at (through) in a building with about 12 floors in a modern reasonably-big city? Is the glass likely to be completely unbreakable with readily-available things? Or is it going to be like a car side-window, tempered to shatter into thousands of not-too-troublesome quarter-inch cubes? Or is it going to fall away in huge, sharp shards? How does one deal with such things, if one's trying to break one's way out?

For what it's worth, it's a pretty good bet that my floor wouldn't rate glass actually designed for bullet resistance--we're not THAT big a target for bad guys. (At least, not my department.)
 
Return of the J.D. said:
That looks impressive, DCFireman. What do you use for each component (assuming it's not a proprietary secret)? Like, what descender, what cordage? Etc.?
Click to expand...


Not proprietary at all. I use a CMC Escape Artist. and 40' of their ProSeries escape line. It's an 8mm fire resistant cordage thats rated to around 3000 lbs. For the anchor hook I'm using something called the NARS hook, also sold by CMC. It offers several different ways to anchor off quickly and is lightweight. It's all pre-attached to a belt that I put on over my gear en route to every fire.

I became a dealer for them after using their equipment for several years and finally starting my company. The kit I use is just a fine tuned version of some available products until I got exactly what I wanted. I've practiced with this setup several dozen times and am confident in it's ability to get me out quickly.

There are less expensive ways to get a similar result. For an office building, a hook might not be necessary, as long as you have a preselected anchor and a plan to attach to it. A piece of webbing pretied into a seat will suffice as a harness. The descent device could be a mini figure 8 and the only real expense would be the high strength cordage.
 
Return of the J.D. said:
What I wonder, I guess, is this: what kind(s) of glass am I looking at (through) in a building with about 12 floors in a modern reasonably-big city? Is the glass likely to be completely unbreakable with readily-available things? Or is it going to be like a car side-window, tempered to shatter into thousands of not-too-troublesome quarter-inch cubes? Or is it going to fall away in huge, sharp shards? How does one deal with such things, if one's trying to break one's way out?

For what it's worth, it's a pretty good bet that my floor wouldn't rate glass actually designed for bullet resistance--we're not THAT big a target for bad guys. (At least, not my department.)
Click to expand...

Ours are not bullet resistant, we had a couple shot out a few months ago. When I took fire warden training, they told us that one window on every floor was "breakable", for the fire department. The rest are essentially unbreakable, whatever that means. Our building was constructed in the 70's.

Our fire alarms are directly wired into the nearest fire station, their response time is very fast.
 
What is the building construction where you work? Do the walls of the offices run floor to ceiling? or does have a dropped ceiling with a common plenum (the gap between the dropped ceiling and the actual deck of the floor above).

If you work in a high rise of center core construction then your chance of locating a safe anchor point to rappel from is low. the amount of rope necessary will be close to 150'.

learn you building intimately. with your eyes closed learn how to find your way to the exits by counting doors.

Gear is less important than preparation and composure.
 
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