On the Issue of Hotels Fire Protection

An impulse to the rapid construction of new hotels in Russia was given by several factors – amonst these were the Olympic Games in Sochi and the football World Cup. But still the main factor is a real shortage of middle level hotels across the country, beginning from the capital, where this problem is most acute. In Russia these hotels are built by private developers and state corporations for their needs, there are also multiplied famous international hotels such as Hilton, Holiday Inn, Marriott, Hyatt, Park Inn, Mercure, Ibis, Radisson, and so on.

Subject of hotels fire protection directly touched me in 2007, when being on a business trip my wife and I rented a room at the Radisson Hotel in a small town near Boston, United States. The day before wу had a long flight from Moscow to New York, then from New York to Boston, and the following meeting, negotiations ... in fine, when at 4:0 a.m. we were awakened by a loud ringing from hall and the speaker voice said: “Fire alarm, immediately leave your rooms!”, I was not ready for such an eventuality neither physically nor morally. That was a three-stories building, and we were on the second floor, and I thought if there is need to jump – it is not a critical altitude and tried to asleep.

However, the voice from the speakers never ceased, ringing in the corridor did not stop, and I could hear the guests anxiously talking and passing along the corridor towards the exit. Finally, we gave up and got dressed (in the street was October and at nights there was rather cold), I took my bag with laptop and documents, and we left the building with the latest guests unwillingly went out to the street in front of the main entrance of the hotel. More disciplined Americans, about fifty persons, were evacuated obviously very quickly, most of them including sleepy children, were standing without shoes or in slippers, wrapped in their blankets. They looked at me with his wife, emerged under the wire and dressed in jackets, initially frowned upon, and after a little while with some envy – outside it was hardly above plus 10 C degrees...

So we all stood still for a few minutes, not knowing what’s going on exactly, because no one saw smoke or fire. Then with wailing sirens and sparkling red-and-blue lights came two or three American fire-fighting units, and the firefighters – the brave guys rushed out dressing on the run their ammunition and oxygen masks, entered the building, and we were waited. Seven or eight minutes later they came back, got in their beautiful red cars and left the scene, and the hotel manager loudly announced that the danger was over and everyone can go back to their rooms.

The people demanded the details – and a staffman explained that in one the hotel office spaces indeed was a small fire and smoke that triggered the fire signal system. Because of that automatically turned on the fire alarm and voice alert, which forced the roomers’ evacuation at 4:0 a.m. Of course, the alarm was address-analog, and the whole hotel was also protected by a water sprinkler fire-fighting system. In hotel also was a restaurant, which kitchen was protected by a special kitchen fire system. I had no chance to look into the kitchen, but I surely know it, because installation of such system enacted in the safety standards, both in national (NFPA-National Fire Protection Association) and hotel’s internal security standards.

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Text: Anton Annenkov