I understand the point you're making but it doesn't consider that fire safety is made up of layers, including (but not limited to) construction, equipment, policy and response. "Ah shit my building is on fire, I better run" makes so many assumptions that it cannot be considered a meaningful fire safety strategy. For example, what if I am asleep? what if I am deaf? what if I cannot walk?

Certainly, there's disasters where multiple catastrophic failures result in horrific outcomes, but if we design policy around "absolute safety is impossible, so run" then we'll be less safe and more anxious. The safest buildings are big well-managed apartment buildings with shelter in place policies, because robust strategies that have been implemented from the ground-up are always going to beat half-baked strategies implemented based on an approximate understanding of single family home building regulations.

As glib as it is to acknowledge, apartment buildings are so safe because safety is built on the back of loss. I am benefiting from the lessons learned from every disaster that has come before.

Response was the first thing that came to mind reading your initial post. I bet you have a full-time fire service close by your building. 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. I can think of several multistory apartment buildings that I know are in volunteer fire department districts off the top of my head. And it’s not like I memorize fire districts.

Volunteer firefighters live in rural areas and mostly serve farm and shall towns. Every suburb I've lived in has full time firefighters. Most people live in cities and suburbs not rural areas.

There are about as many people in rural areas with volunteer fire departments as there are people in non-rural areas with volunteer fire departments.

17% of the US lives in a rural area. 32% of the US population is covered by a volunteer fire department. There are plenty of suburbs with VFDs, often lower-income.

https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...

Because volunteers spend so much less of their time actually fighting fire. 70% of firefighters being volunteers doesn't mean anything like 70% of firefighting is done by volunteers.

And don't expect the volunteers to accomplish much--when the alarm goes off they have to go to the firehouse first, and thus will have a bad response time compared to a professional fire service. They're far more about keeping the fire from spreading than actually putting it out.

>Shelter in place as deadly

Similarly, the standard instruction for earthquakes is "stop drop and hold", since the advice has to be fully general, covering all people in all circumstances, including highrises where evacuation is not possible. But I live in the ground floor of a not particularly well-built four story apartment building; my desk is eight feet away from an outside door. If there's an earthquake, I'm leaving!

I’ve lived and worked in very earthquake prone cities (Wellington, NZ). One of the reasons given to stay inside is that in certain areas of the city, shattered glass falling from sky scrapers would fill the street up to a meter deep along Lambton Quay.

That may not be the best idea. Certainly, if the earthquake is strong enough to put you in danger on the ground floor, objects can and likely will fall down from those four stories while you’re exiting the building.

The first time an earthquake woke me up, I was out of bed, down 14 flights, and out in the street within a couple of minutes. The stairs were open-air so maybe the building didn't qualify as "high-rise". I don't think I erred, although maybe my neighbors who took a half hour to reach the street did? I guess they were looking for shoes... ISTM "the standard instruction" would be useful in a very narrow set of circumstances. Obviously it would be useless if the building completely collapses killing everyone, whether immediately or after half an hour. It wouldn't be any better than any other procedure if the building remains intact. The only circumstance in which it would save lives would be when the building immediately collapses enough to kill people in stairwells but not in apartments, and safety crews can be counted on to extract people from the wreckage. That seems pretty minor compared to the obvious advantages of immediate evacuation.

I’d probably choose unfenced home swimming pools, driving laws, pollution and guns to fix before building fire codes, if we’re looking at “things that seem to be insanity”.

When the topic is "Why doesn't the US do stairwells like other countries?" and the answer is almost entirely "Fire codes prohibit it for the following list of mass-casualty fire deaths due to stairwell behaviors in fire," the rest of those things seem rather off topic.

But that’s not what the topic was - it became “safety rules that should exist because not doing so is clearly insane even to a non-expert”.

Yet they seem hell bent on making houses from a cardboard and other extremely flammable materials.

Eh, the topic is broad. The real question is: where does it make sense for society to put resources to prevent premature death?

One option is staircases (aimed at reducing mass casualty events in fires). There are other options to improve fire safety. There are other options to improve safety in other circumstances.

Perhaps with the costs of second staircases, there are things we could do to buildings for less money that would save more lives from fire. Should we do both? Just the cheaper one? Neither?

How do we decide which ones are justified for their cost, and which ones aren't? Who should bear these costs? What things should be grandfathered and have a slow transition towards higher safety? What things should be immediately improved?

The answer to the staircase question comes down to how we answer questions like this. And the fact that we may be tolerating much bigger risks is definitely an interesting point.

The reason "shelter in place" is recommended is that it's the smoke that kills. People naturally fear flames but you're more likely to pass out from toxic smoke and never wake up, without ever seeing actual flame. Several stairwells don't help unless they're completely isolated from each other, which is totally unfeasible.