Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Were People Trapped Inside the Titanic When it Sank?" video.

  1. I imagine it's much like emergency evacuation of a multi-story building, only worse. I was at one time a fire warden on my floor of a 20 story office building. We had a fully developed evac plan which we rehearsed. The first time we announced that there would be a drill in 2 day's time. On the day it went reasonably well, we got the whole building evacuated in 15 minutes. The fire warden team then held a meeting and we discussed lessons learnt. We then, a few weeks later, held another pre-announced drill. It went real smooth, we got everybody out in the target time of 12 minutes. A few months later, we decided to have an unanounced drill. We got the city fire brigade to help make it realistic - they turned up with their truck sirens going. The drill was shambles. Some people panicked. Some people refused to leave their desks. Some cleared out without getting clearance from their warden. It took over 30 minutes to clear the building. And buildings don't tilt or fill with water. Our evac plan involved the phased entry of staff on each floor entering the stair wells so that the maximum number of people could be in the stair wells with gaps between groups of people so that there was no bunch-ups or congestion. It worked perfectly in the pre-announced drills, but not in the unannounced drill. But I've worked in other buildings that made that look really good. In a 7-story building, an evac drill was so badly run that it took 40 minutes to clear the building - wardens trying to control people with load hailers with flat batteries didn't help. In that same building, when a fire alarm was triggered, big fans automatically pressurised the stairwells so that fire on any floor would not enter a stairwell. Trouble was, women found the stairwell doors unexpectedly hard to open due to the pressure and panicked.
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