Riiven Slants
The Inward Door
The fire that supposedly rewrote the exit door had already been written into a code nobody adopted.
The bathroom door in your house opens inward. Almost every bathroom door does. A nightclub is not allowed to hang a door that way, and has not been allowed since 1903, which is thirty-nine years before the fire everyone credits for the rule.
Try to picture a bathroom door that opens outward. Maybe a public restroom on a college campus, where an engineer fought for it. In private homes the door pushes in, every time. The front door of the same house has no rule at all. Residential code cares about width and landings, not direction.
There are practical reasons given. Privacy, because you cannot swing a door open into someone in the hallway. Corridor space, because an outward door clips people walking past. Water containment, because an outward door can fail to seal shower spray. All true. None of them about getting a body out.
On November 28, 1942, the Cocoanut Grove nightclub burned in Boston. The revolving front door jammed in seconds. Side doors opened inward against the crowd. 492 people died. The rule that would have saved most of them already existed. Outward swing had been code for assembly halls since the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903.
Boston had not adopted it. Nearly every failure in that building was addressed in the 1942 edition of the national exits code, published that same year and sitting unused. What the fire actually changed was narrower: revolving doors now need hinged doors beside them, decorations cannot be flammable, and a room has a legal maximum number of people in it.
The bathroom door kept swinging inward through all of it. The shower door in that same bathroom did not. Residential code requires the shower door to swing out, on the grounds that a person who collapses inside must not block their own rescue. The safety logic got as far as the shower and stopped.
The tilt
Building codes are made of fire, but only where someone bothered to adopt them. Boston owned the rule that would have saved the room.
Sources
- Paul Benzaquin, Holocaust!: The Shocking Story of the Boston Cocoanut Grove Fire (Henry Holt) (1959)
- Boston Fire Department, Report Concerning the Cocoanut Grove Fire (1942)
- NFPA Building Exits Code, first published 1927 after the Iroquois Theatre fire; now NFPA 101 Life Safety Code (National Fire Protection Association) (1927)
- International Building Code, Section 1010.1.2.1 Direction of Swing (outward swing required at an occupant load of 50 or more)
- International Residential Code, Section P2708.1 (hinged shower doors must open outward)
