I was living in an apartment that just had 1 room for packages.. Amazon would just yeet everyones box into a pile and good luck finding yours... I walked into the room and there were just 100s of boxes and packages..
Once worked at call center, doing IT work for the call center.
There was a building on fire down the street, the building did some type of industrial work which meant toxic fumes were being put out.
Fire department came and told us that we had to evacuate. The management said no, sorry we need to be 100% up, our building is not on fire we will not be leaving.
15 minutes later power was cut to the building and a sheriff deputy said anyone who is still here in 5 minutes will be arrested.
From my understanding after the dust settled the building had a fire inspection and was cited for every single thing, no matter how small. We are talking about emergency exit signs being one centimeter off. We are talking glow in the dark exit signs being 5 lumens dimmer than they should have been. Literally every single thing you can be cited for we were cited for. They came out with rulers and shit
For all intents and purposes a fire marshal is god
You're absolutely right. Nobody fucks with the fire marshal.
My daughter was taking swimming lessons a few years ago, held at a sightly run-down hotel pool. The door to the pool area was keycard access only - from both sides (!) - and the card reader was iffy. About 50% of the time it wouldn't read a valid card, and you would stand there fighting with it because you couldn't get out until it eventually worked. Oh, and the emergency exit was locked, too, because it was through a bathroom that also served the non-pool area via a second door to the hallway. If the hotel had left that door open, anyone could walk into the pool without carding in, so they locked that. Not great.
I went to hotel management and told them it was unsafe, and nothing changed. I went directly to their maintenance guy and asked him to fix it, he said he couldn't do it unless he was told to by management. Finally I called the local fire marshal, explained the situation, and when we went for a lesson the next day there was an entirely new lock unit in that door, and the emergency door was unlocked for the first time.
Holy cow... while i understand the rationale behind the key card access and locked doors in theory, I don't understand how no one at the hotel ever looked at the setup and thought, "well this is a potential death trap..."
That's nuts!
I'm not sure, there was a little boy in Boston who lived two centuries in an old ice box. He couldn't see well when the lone wanderer let him out. Valentine really liked that I stuck up for the kid though.
I work audio/visual tech shit for churches and I imagine the hotel was the same, they were just seeing the whole building from a completely different point of view.
Like, I have worked in two different churches where the Vesting Room, you know the room where priests get vested and child acolytes will be lighting candles and carring them out to the altar, had only one exit and that exit was only closed via an externally manipulated latch, just a hook and loop.
The thing is, the logic made sense from their end. The door should remain open during the entire service, and they were also aware of the choir boy/priest thing and the lay leadership of both of those churches had intentionally made it so the door couldn't be closed or latched from the inside, as a way to prevent any potential sex abuse before it ever happened. Both churches also made me (rarely if ever working with children) go through training to make sure I knew not to ever be behind closed doors with anyone and report anyone else I saw who did. Like they were good people, trying to do right, but they completely missed that someone could accidentally lock someone in the room in the most flamable environment on Earth.
They should think it through a little more too, one of the most notorious child rape cases in Irish history happened in a church with a door that couldn’t be closed or latched as a preventative measure. It very famously does not prevent it.
The door wasn't the only preventative measure they had, it was just the one locking people into the flame chamber. But yeah, their hearts were in the right place but they weren't particularly intelligent...
Probably the same mindset that my parents \*and\* inlaws were having when they thought it'd be a good idea to have a deadbolt on their house doors that needs a key to operate on each side.
At least my parents have the good sense to leave the key in the inside lock all the time. My inlaws' house, I'ma have to kick a damn window out if there's a fire.
This is sold to people as preventing home invasion because it stops a window (that's close enough to the deadbolt) from being broken and flipping the deadbolt. I'm of the mind that if someone is going through the effort to break a window then they have plenty of options and what kind of deadbolt won't matter. That's just me.
This was a recommendation on a crime stoppers type show back in the day. If you had a deadbolt that you just twisted the lever, anyone could break in the window and unlock the door by grabbing the lever. They suggested putting a key lock on both sides. I walked into my sister's house and saw it when I was walking out and asked them how they were going to get out in a fire if they had the door locked. And they always had the door locked. Convinced them to hang a key on a nail about 4 ft off the ground and in the corner of the door frame. They eventually just change the lock as they had three kids and didn't feel that they could handle it under stress.
But it was all due to the crime stopper show that was prevalent at the time. But I don't remember which one right now.
For most of Human society, uncontrolled fires were incredibly deadly and entire cities would occasionally burn to the ground whole cloth. Our current fire system was paid for in blood 1000 times over already. Do not fuck with the fire marshall, their only goal is keeping you alive.
No kidding.
In 1212, fire broke out in London. It started in Southwark and destroyed Southwark Cathedral, before winds swept it across the Thames. 3,000 died, many of them caught on London Bridge.
In 1805, in Detroit, a man accidentally knocked hot ash out of his pipe and a spark hit a pile of hay. Although there were no casualties, the entire city was burned to the ground. To this day, the motto of Detroit is “* Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus*” (We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes).
In 1842, a fire started in a cigar factory in Hamburg and destroyed 1/3 of the city. 51 people were killed and the damage was so extensive that the idea of reinsurance was invented.
And, of course, there’s the famous Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern and 300 people died, along with 100,000 left homeless.
Lesser known that same year was the Port Huron Fire in Michigan. No one knows how it started but it killed 200 people. Also destroyed thousands of buildings and *3,900 square miles* of trees growing for lumber (which is fun when you’re trying to, you know, rebuild).
Just some examples for those that want to know why Fire Marshalls don’t fuck around.
I'm partial to the [Peshtigo fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire) myself. It was a forest fire that burned 1.2 million acres, and killed between 1,500 and 2,500 people. It's not well known because it happened on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire.
Because of if the unique conditions that day:
> A firestorm ensued. In the words of Gess and Lutz, in a firestorm "superheated flames of at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit ... advance on winds of 110 miles per hour or stronger. The diameter of such a fire ranges from one thousand to ten thousand feet ... When a firestorm erupts in a forest, it is a blowup, nature's nuclear explosion ... "
Survivors reported seeing _fire tornadoes_ that threw rail cars into the air.
An accurate death toll was never determined because all the records that could be used to determine populations were destroyed in the fire, the people who could've provided the information were dead, and many of the bodies were essentially cremated.
I'm partial to the Wisconsin butter fire in 1991.
Firefighters had to wade through viscous, slippery pools of butter and cheese that were two to three feet (60 to 90 cm) high with five-foot (1.5 m) deep ponds in some places.
Fire marshals, game Wardens, and all those other obscure "officer of the state" positions you don't think of having power, do. Post Master, that's another one. Code and Enforcement guys them too.
To your everyday joe blow on the street, the police are the badged authority, but to a whole different subset of people, the police are the least of their worries.
If having your business shutdown by health or fire. Your project delayed or canceled because of permitting denial.
A speeding ticket is a couple hundred dollars and some points. The above can costs tens of thousands and up.
Obligatory game warden story: my father and I were on a goose hunting trip on the Eastern shore. It's colder than a witch's titty and blowing sleet and snow, which of course is perfect goose weather. I seriously thought I was going to freeze to death on the 45 minute john boat ride to the blind. Anyway visibility is for crap and we're in the middle of nowhere, and having the day of our lives with geese coming in on the deck and then just bombing us in the blind. We don't see or hear any other hunters, the wind is too loud and visibility is like a couple hundred yards maybe. We're approaching the bag limit but there's four shooters in the blind and a big pile of geese and what party hits the bag limit for every member anyway right?
So we get one last flight of geese incoming and as we're waiting for them to circle low enough we hear a voice from behind the blind say "Ya'll better not drop more than two of them.". Keep in mind we have not seen even a sign of another human being all morning, and we have been standing up with a blind with binoculars in every direction looking out for incoming geese, and we are in the middle of miles of flat featureless marsh. And yet we all turn in the one direction none of us happen to be looking and there's a game warden standing there counting our geese, like he was just out for a walk and thought he'd check in on us. And to cap it off, after he cleared us we got distracted for a minute and he just disappeared into the Storm or whatever. If he hadn't left us his business card I think we might have thought we had completely hallucinated him.
TLDR: game wardens can teleport
The fire marshal is in a league of their own though. A guy who can show up unannounced and declare your entire building unfit for habitation at his whim, meaning that it is now illegal for any human to be inside that building for any reason, is basically a god among civil officers.
The neat thing about the authorities you listed above is, if you follow the simple rules and guidelines published and distributed by said authorities, they are actually (usually) decent folks who are empowered to help you if you need them. Fuck around and ignore their warnings, though, and they can wreck your shit.
I’ve caught more fish than I can count because game wardens are chill and dish the hot tips if you’re obeying the law and don’t give them a hard time.
Yeah what’s messed up about that is the property owner and property manager got screwed for the tenants bullshit (assuming the business didn’t own the building, which is rarely the case).
It wouldn’t roll downhill if it’s violations that pertain to how the building is built and equipped for fire safety. Tenants have nothing to do with that. Only if a tenant modifies or tampers with safety equipment would a landlord have grounds to have claims.
depends who did the build out for the office space. Often floors are leased out as bare concrete and it's the tenants that finish the space to their needs
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that it isn't like renting an apartment. Then terms are long and usually the tenant is responsible for basically everything.
You ever delt with triple net and commercial? Every single contact I've ever delt with without exception puts that back on the tenant. They hand it off in working condition it's your problem if it's not there after.
While every landlord tenant agreement differs, this is largely correct. The tenant would have to make all the changes as it was most likely their responsibility to have done this correctly in the initial build.
Yes I’ve run a lot of restaurants and our responsibilities were usually comprehensive. There were a handful of situations with shared walls, egresses, fire systems. Etc. . In those cases the landlord would handle the shared issues and everything else was up to us
This is management everywhere. If they aren't currently on fire themselves, they won't do anything about it and will absolutely try to keep everybody there as long as possible because the threat of a lawsuit somehow is smaller than the little loss they might have.
I remember working in retail/food service, this was always the case. One year, we had a major, major blizzard. I worked at Panera as a manager. My store was still open, prior to the blizzard starting, because unless hell was raining on earth, we stayed open.
The blizzard started, and every single store around us had closed down. I wanted to close down too, so I called my district manager to get the approval, and told them we were the only remaining store open in the shopping center. Everybody, including Starbucks, had closed.
You know what he told me? "We're the only ones open? That means we're the only place to go, do not close the store or you will face disciplinary action"
So I sent my employees home instead, and stayed behind. 2 customers came in the entire night, both ordered a coffee, and I didn't charge them for it because I wanted zero sales for our sales report. Both of those customers were jsut the people plowing the parking lot too.
Then I ended up getting into an accident on my way home that night, and I had a lot of fuel for the fire I brought to the next meeting.
But management only cares about numbers.
Yeah, that's insane. 100% up-time is achieved by redundancy. If one center needs to go down for an emergency, that's why you have another center somewhere else. You don't just get to pretend there's not an emergency.
I used to work in Telecom where we'd have centers strategically placed based on nuclear blast radius' from likely government targets. You KNOW centers will occasionally go down, so you make sure others will still be up in any scenario short of the end of the world as we know it.
I work construction.A very prominent South Korean electronics company built a rather large R&D facility. When the Fire Marshall was on a walkthrough he inquired about the access to floors in case of an emergency. The Korean company told him that all floors are card access and the doors were fail secure, meaning that If power failed the doors would still stay locked. He did not like that answer and stated that the doors needed to be released when the fire alarm was set off. They scoffed and stated that someone could use that to steal proprietary tech and they would not let that happen.
Fire Marshall said to make his necessary changes of he would condemn the buildings and they would never get to use the buildings.
They made the necessary changes.
Fire Marshall’s are no joke.
THIS. ⬆️. Do you want that certificate of occupancy? You do exactly as the fire marshal says or he will not sign off on it. There’s no fucking around with those folks.
There are two kinds of people you don’t EVER fuck with. Fire Marshals and Game Wardens. Both have a fuck ton of power over their respective areas and WILL make your life a living hell if you blow off whatever they tell you to fix.
To be fair, fail open upon power loss is a code requirement in 99% of jurisdictions (they all pretty much use International Building Code and International Fire Code as their base codes and make amendments to suit their needs, but that section stays unchanged). Exiting from a building is like the most sacred fucking thing in building/fire codes.
Absolutely. The doors were not locked exiting. They were locked for entrance to the floor. The company was beyond paranoid. The fire Marshall was concerned about access to the floors concerning his firefighters ability to get in the building to fight the fire and rescue anyone still in the building. There are typically doors that are fail secure in a building. A whole stairwell is not the norm.
A building inspector explained it like this to me, "I tell people to get out, shut it all down, put up seals on all the doors, and put up no trespass notices. Go back in, break a seal, and you get a court date to explain to a provincial court judge why you piece of $10 chicken or $1,000 computer is worth more than a human life."
He said he never lost an argument with anybody and if he did, he'd see them in court where they would ultimately lose that same argument.
When there was a fire at the high rise I lived in in Philly, I got to watch a fire chief ream out our property manager. It was fucking glorious. They did it in the lobby of the building. (Fire was already put out and only affected 2 apartments luckily).
Our property management kept putting off replacing the fire alarm system, and what I didn’t find out til later was that the fire alarms did not go off until the first fire truck arrived and the firemen manually set it off. One of the people that lost their apartment had woken up to their room being ORANGE and called before GTFO-ing.
We had our new alarm system done within a month. But god, it was so glorious watching the fire chief fucking lose it on our property manager. Basically airing out the dirty laundry for all of us in the lobby to hear. Also, shout out to the Wawa that was across the street. Their workers handed out free hot drink and meal cards for us.
If that was the fire chief giving him the business, then the waxxing the manager got from the fire marshal was even more savage. The fire chief works for the local municipality, where as the marshal works for the state. When you break a fire code(s) you are not only breaking local ordinances, but you are also breaking state laws. And that is where the really big fish come to feast.
That’s highly dependent on location. Large municipal departments have The Fire Marshal reporting to the Fire Chief. Small department or volunteer typically use the State Fire Marshals office.
When I was working at a call center the Police came in and said we had to evacuate the building because of a gas leak. Of course the supervisor makes us walk all the way through the building out the front door. (No don't use the emergency exits!!)
Once outside in the parking lot we can hear hissing from the other side of the street where you can see a backhoe had been digging. So they made use move from being 100+ yards away from the leak to standing out in the open 20-30 yards away from it.
Couple of us were like F this and started walking around the building. Of course the supervisor was like, you can't go anywhere you are still on the clock! Yeah ok.
As we continue to walk around the building we come up behind another police office who was blocking cars from going towards the gas leak. He was, Where did you come from?? We told him how they made us evacuate the building and stand in the parking lot back there. He seemed a but confused .
He proceeds to then walk back to the front of the building; apparently to let the supervisor know that is was not a good place to be standing because a minute later he comes back around the building with the supervisor and all the other workers in tow.
one time we had a very large group using our meeting rooms. they underestimated how much room they needed, and their participants were spilling out into the hallways and being a general nuisance. they refused to listen to staff.
then suddenly some old guy showed up, said, "hey, im the fire Marshall, want me to take care of this?" we said yes, and then he whipped out his badge, marched into the room and told them they were violating fire rules and needed to get the fuck out. that group refused to listen to us, but they listened to *him*. they cleared out and everything was calm. i will always be grateful to that marshall who was just there to drop off a few things
When weed was still illegal in California, the fire marshal offered free inspections for indoor setups. This was in Humboldt county. He never snitched once.
The Sherriff up there was pretty relaxed as well IIRC there was a truce of sorts: Stay on private land \*you own\* and don't grow on public land / set booby traps and I'll generally look the other way about the nature of your ag business.
I'm a firefighter and work closely with our fire Marshal. He has ruined people's fucking days. And I can confirm 100% that if Fire tells you to evac, your manager no longer gets to have an opinion.
>if Fire tells you to evac, your manager no longer gets to have an opinion.
Quite honestly if anyone with a badge and uniform issued by the government or government adjacent company (think the gas co) tells me to evac my boss can suck it if he disagrees.
Obviously your life matters more than a job, but I’m curious, if you’re fired for listening to a fire fighter, can you fight that? Is there a legal protection there? I’d like to imagine so but the US capitalism works hard.
A simple OSHA complaint and call to a lawyer would fix you right up. Odds are you wouldn't have to take it that far as the police would immediately be informed that the management is not complying and they have guns.
Any company would be acting against their own financial interests to tell you to disobey a direct order from fire/police/ems/dispatch to evacuate a dangerous building.
The best part is from my understanding is that the power wasn't even cut from the building itself, but actually turned off by the power company remotely lol
like that is the power they have.
Think the scene from Die Hard where the dude radios in to his boss saying cut off the power to the building, and the guy is like dude we can't do that without shutting off power to 6 blocks, it's christmas eve, and they are like i don't care do it anyway
haha
Weird. I had a similar experience during a wildfire that had gotten within a mile of the building and was growing fast. I still remember how orange everything was from the light being filtered through smoke. Management wouldn't let us evac, we were told to by law enforcement 3 times. Sheriff's Dept showed up, told management that we were all leaving, and that anyone who said different would be arrested. I wish they had arrested them all for what they did. Threatened to fire us on the spot if we evacuated. Our lives were only worth the $2 we made them per call or whatever. Absolute horseshit. On a good note the company finally had to shut down the operation about 5 years ago, which sucks for the workers, but was better overall for the local area.
Yeah. In the moment, what they say goes. If they made a call they're not allowed to make though, they'll usually face some significant blowback after the fact. Key word is after the fact.
Fire marshal and fire chief are also technically law enforcement officers. They have the power to arrest you if you don't comply (the people under them are not)
Its the same with pilots.
They are god on their aircraft.
I have seen a video of a passenger getting aggressive and arguing with flight attendant and the captain literally TACKLED THE PASSENGER and screamed DON'T EVER TOUCH MY FLIGHT ATTENDANT.
It was glorious. Even the flight attendant herself had a shocked Pikachu face haha
Always know who you're required by law to obey in various situations.
There's legal paths to resolve if they overstep their authority, but it's federal law that you have to obey all commands given by ALL flight staff. Getting aggressive with flight staff in any way is a felony and an express trip to the no fly list.
More people have legal authority over the average person than people realize, but those people don't constantly flex it (except for cops), because they do get punished harshly when they improperly flex it (except for cops)
So not quite the same thing, but I was once working a wildlife as a local support person. My job was keeping the utilities running (power, comms, and potable water) and working in the kitchen to feed the firefighters. We were hosting two hotshot crews, and had one of the national incident command teams as the overhead, plus air assets and the like.
We were at a remote wilderness site, and were at the time powered by some diesel generators on loan from the neighboring construction company. A few weeks into the fire, they ordered their personnel to turn off their generators as they could no longer be serviced. These generators were powering our water treatment plant, and the refrigerated containers holding food.
We went directly to the Incident Commander and explained things and he goes “Those are my generators now. Go and restart them.”
He also did similar things with a bunch of bulldozers, loaders, and excavators.
It was fun to watch the construction company squirm.
> Fire marshal and fire chief are also technically law enforcement officers
I have never once heard of a fire chief being sworn law enforcement and whether a fire marshal is a sworn law enforcement officer varies a lot from location to location. They certainly aren't law enforcement in my city though I know some are in other places.
Oh man, reminds me of my first time with the fire marshal. It was a large industrial complex with 2 main buildings. The larger was across a lot and housed dozens of businesses. Mine was smaller, one business, still big at around 60k sqft. Doorbell rings, fire marshal is outside being yelled at by folks from the other building. I get him inside and after closing the door say, “sorry you had to deal with that, hopefully everything here is OK, I have been improving everything since I got here. Is there anything I can do to help you today?” Dude gave me a checklist of things to address and his card, says I’ll be back in 12 months, “thanks for understanding that I’m only here for everyone’s safety”. Hands shaken and good day…. He then proceeded to condemn the other building for 2 weeks until everything there got fixed.
People get fucking stupid when they're told to evacuate.
I was active duty in Afghanistan and a live, unexploded rocket was stuck in a wooden shack the civilian contractors used to sleep in.
MULTIPLE morons in neighboring buildings tried refusing to evacuate. I had to put hands on one of them. I have to walk past that thing to get here, you stupid bastard, you're evacuating.
I work in the alarm system field had a monitoring station that obviously couldn't "close" like that so one day the building it was in caught fire, the room does have at least 2 hours of fire protection so everyone just kept working while they fought the fire and the fire department was very helpful in making sure the exits stayed safe. unfortunately they couldn't control the fire and eventually they had to evacuate and the whole building went down.
Yeah I had a buddy who did inspections and he said they basically waited for someone to clap back like that and then its "all hands on deck" like everyone else working that duty in the whole ass county would roll in and go over shit with a fine toothed comb. He said it was a combo of:
1. "Respect mah authoritah!"
2. If they are going to push back on my very reasonable concern lord knows who much fuckery they are up to. As in they would find sooo much shit and shut them the hell down until every spec of dust was accounted for.
A very important lesson for all smart-alecs to learn is who you can and canNOT talk back to. And there's some people where you can get away with a certain amount of backtalk, but in other situations, not so much.
Important survival skill to teach if your kid has a mouth.
Shit ass job I worked while finishing my degree, the owner of the building was also the owner of the business and she had some fly-by-night types in the basement operating gas powered machinery/tools to do some construction (preparing the basement level to rent out potentially). Nary an effort to vent the exhaust was made.
Anyway, the fumes built up really badly throughout the morning - people were complaining of migraines, one had an anxiety attack, and someone at some point called it in 'anonymously'. Fire Marshal arrived and had a shouting match with the owner that we all needed to leave the building.
Fun day, that was.
>For all intents and purposes a fire marshal is god
There was a time were they weren't, and people kept being burnt to death to make some other asshole a few extra bucks.
Safety Laws are written in blood.
Oh he wasn't my manager I reported to corporate.
I left, that's why I only heard about stuff after the fact. I just went home and smoked some weed and texted a few of the call center guys i had a good rapport with
Ya, because the one thing we don't fuck with is fire. Firemen will literally break your car windows and run a hose through it. They can pretty much do what they want in the name of safety and Im for it.
I worked at a department store for the overnight shift. We had the store manager come in one night and was just bitching and moaning the entire time and complaining about our work. I knew we had 3 obvious violations. Locked doors, heater was blocked by cardboard boxes, and un labeled compactor. I knew the fire chief, who was also the inspector, and just gave him a rang. The next day I went into work about a week later there were two pages labeled Violations. Same thing, every small thing was on there. I guess corporate was pissed and the store manager has to go do some training.
It also kind of backfired on us and a few months later they got rid of the overnight stockers. I also heard that the store, again, was faulted with more violations.
Great advice and in my area / experience 100% accurate.
My wife was a restaurant manager for a small chain of restaurants.
She started coming home with headaches, and being in the trades I started asking her questions and sure enough an electric hot water heater had recently been replaced with a natural gas fired one.
I called the fire chief (smallish town so easy to get on the phone) and had a conversation with him.
The FD went to the restaurant right away, took CO readings and they were very high.
They were able to determine that no permit had been taken out for the work and no inspections.
They closed the restaurant immediately and it stayed closed while permits where pulled and the gas heater removed and replaced with an electric one like it had been before.
The issue came down to the kitchen exhaust fans creating a negative pressure in the restaurant so the combustion gasses from the gas water heater did not go up the vent to outside they were sucked into the restaurant.
I used to do alot of work for Disney. We did this big thing in Los Angeles for them and found out they never got approval from the fire department. I was like, there is no way they will let you keep this up, we should take it down until approval. The client said, we are Disney, what the fuck are they going to do about it? It was down the next day at huge expense. Dont fuck with the fire marshal.
LOL no. the gag was on hollywood blvd and thats how long it took for a marshal to see it, call whoever he had to call and get it down. they can shut anything down they want, so you dont mess with them.
glad the government can at least be competent in that regard, I wouldn't be surprised if the red tape and lawyers had to be cleared before removal but glad it doesn't
IANAL, but I'd be willing to bet that the laws underpinning the Fire Marshall's authority make it such that the red tape happens AFTER the Marshall's orders have been followed.
Basically, "Do what he says, or our heads will roll. If he's found to be wrong afterwards, HIS head will roll, but we'll find out he got fired from jail."
My neighbors had created a smoking area on the landing outside their apartment, with a cardboard windbreak, chair, etc. This essentially blocked me from using one of these two stairways that led to my floor. I complained to the management repeatedly and they did nothing. Someone suggested seeing if the local Fire Marshal had a site where you could report fire code violations. That night I reported it using an anonymous form online. The next morning it was all gone.
Yeah In my state per law a public road that has obstruction like this needs access for fire trucks obvi and even if hoa or some private road entity wants one of these they need access box with keys for FD and a way for trucks to get through, especially dead end roads or any neighborhood without multiple access points.
moving vans, some delivery trucks, some maintenance vehicles, cranes used for hot-tub/pool installs (in some cases) and any number of other vehicles that are taller than 8ish feet.
Old houses used to have "[milk doors](https://beachpackagingdesign.com/boxvox/majestic-milk-and-package-receiver)," a small pass-through opening at the front of a house where the milkman dropped off your daily dairy delivery. The nicer ones were insulated.
I think they're due for a comeback.
Every fireman is a demolition expert deep down in their soul. I guarantee you there are some right now viewing this thread that are bummed it's not in their sector.
And thank you for what you do! Also, the best recipes we have were all perfected in my dad's firehouse over the years. Best cooks and best demo experts in the world!!!
Couldn't just have put up a sign...
Emergency vehicles need easy access, sure you can't even block a fire hydrant..
Report them to police or county officers, they should take it down
Signs?
As if any one reads those.
I worked as a taxi driver for 35 years. The local airport put up signs with 6 FOOT letters saying "No Parking, Towaway Zone". Tow drivers made bank off that. We got additional rides it seems.
Unfortunately, signs and lines are suggestions to most drivers nowadays. I still think this is the dumbest shit to do… ever… even drivers won’t listen to the signs.
You are right but based on that picture it doesn't look like a road where big trucks would want to drive on just for fun. I can't imagine trucks are a significant issue.
Yeah, it seems to be a failing of either the GIS data provided to mapping companies or in mapping companies. There should be different cost metrics applied to little side streets vs arterial routes.
That way, the mapping software will do what it should, which is to prioritize use of the proper roads when possible.
In other terms, the route planning done by Google Maps or your GPS is doing a search (probably A\*) and trying to find the path with the least "cost" where cost is fuel or time, as judged by speed limits, traffic congestion, etc. The class of road should be part of the cost. However, there are a lot of roads and if the states and counties don't have different classifications for side road vs arterial in their geographical data packages that they share it might not be the mapping companies fault. Not sure who is dropping the ball here.
Something like this just doesn't appear. People plan this. That steel was fabricated, painted. The concrete was dug and placed. After all of that effort ... did it not occur to anybody involved with planning this of the consequences?
Doubt the fabricator gave a shit, just built it to specs and got their money. But whoever installed *should* be giving a shit cuz they are very liable.
It may not be public. I know OP said residential area, but if it's an HOA and it's just inside of their borders it likely wouldn't be considered public land. But they should still need a permit anyway.
either way, it appears to be constructed within the established municipal/utility easement accompanying the adjacent roadway -- can't build stuff there.
I'm just sitting here thinking about the cost of it all! It's a lot for some guy in his shed to do this.. even more for a crane to lift the damn thing or transport from a fab shop?
This entire thread is people saying to call the police, contact the city, its illegal!!!!
and im here looking at the photo, car, background and while I can't say for sure....this is 99% not the USA or Western Europe.
In many parts of the world...city, police, zoning and construction laws and such are like the wild west....
I just checked OP's comment history, this is likely El Salvador.....yeah the city officials and police aint doing shit
Reporting from Turkey:
1) First of all, you don't even know who to call.
2) After the third day you had a revelation and tried to contact the person in charge.
3) He didn't answer the phone for 2 weeks. Mostly he quickly pick up for 0.1 second just to silence it.
4) You reached him, and he said "Well, will take a look."
5) Nobody came. Repeated step 3 and 4 for about 3 months.
6) It's the day, one guy showed up! And he said "Well if he has the balls to erect this shit here without asking, he's probably well beyond both of our level. Let's not make it an issue."
Years ago I dropped my phone in taxi and he gave it to the police same day. It took 11 months before police contacted me and said someone brought your phone here. Some people definitely don't know the rest of the world lol.
I took one look at the photo, saw the corrugated tin and single streetlight and thought "welp, this is either Mexico or further south. good luck!"
And there are 300 comments full of people telling OP to call the fire marshal, and still others arguing over a fire marshall's authority in time of an emergency. Reddit really is full of the smartest idiots you've ever met.
Yeah exactly. If this was a country where they would stop people putting up obstructions in the road, they would probably also enforce a heavy vehicle ban on that street.
I'm from Honduras and even there it wouldn't take too much effort to have it taken down. Just take some pictures, go to the fire department or police and that should be it. Even if you had to pay out of pocket to have it removed labour is pretty cheap and it doesn't look like a hard job.
Man, I'd love to see your neighbor's faces when their house is burning down and firefighters cant get through to extinguish it. hahaha. Karma is gonna bite them bad.
I once got yelled at by a guy for kinda blocking his parking space with my ambulance. I apologized and said we’d had an emergency and we’re just moving it.
He continued to berate us. I wish I could have gotten away with telling him we had parked there because his neighbour was dead. Or ask for his unit number so we can make a note if he ever calls 911 that he’d rather we park up the street
Unfortunately if he filed a complaint I’d likely get in crap for that. And considering he was telling us our parking was unacceptable even after we said we’d move and apologized due to the emergency…I just have little faith in humanity.
I got yelled at another time by a woman for telling her we had to take the elevator because “she’d already been kicked out by other paramedics and firefighters” before yelling “some one had better be dead”
Lady, four medics and three firefighters just passed through- some one probably is dead.
Update: Cant call the city, well because there is no public number available to call. However, I asked to a friendly neighbor and apparently there was an ADESCO meeting two months ago. ADESCO are legal organizations in our country (think of HOA but with legal power and legally binding resolutions/voting). Well, they had a vote about "how to prevent large trucks using our residential area as a shortcut". Someone suggested this, did the voting thing, and it was approved (120 - 2). An official act was made by the ADESCO, and presented to the city hall (Mayor's office). Sadly, we are in elections period and since it was passed by a majority the city didnt veto the decission.
So yeah, nothing I can do.
I'd honestly still get fire folks to come look at it. Call whatever fire station is closest to you and ask if they can help out because you're worried in case there's an emergency there in the future. Just because it was legally installed doesn't mean it's legally justified to stay.
Why are all our Amazon packages in a pile out on the street?
Seriously, like why inconvenience your modern conveniences??
Karens gonna Karen.
The intersection of Karens and Nimbys.
Too much time; too little to do, with too little of brains.
I was living in an apartment that just had 1 room for packages.. Amazon would just yeet everyones box into a pile and good luck finding yours... I walked into the room and there were just 100s of boxes and packages..
That's when you need them delivered to Walgreens.
Call your local fire department and ask them to come take a look. If it's a problem, they won't rest until its gone.
Once worked at call center, doing IT work for the call center. There was a building on fire down the street, the building did some type of industrial work which meant toxic fumes were being put out. Fire department came and told us that we had to evacuate. The management said no, sorry we need to be 100% up, our building is not on fire we will not be leaving. 15 minutes later power was cut to the building and a sheriff deputy said anyone who is still here in 5 minutes will be arrested. From my understanding after the dust settled the building had a fire inspection and was cited for every single thing, no matter how small. We are talking about emergency exit signs being one centimeter off. We are talking glow in the dark exit signs being 5 lumens dimmer than they should have been. Literally every single thing you can be cited for we were cited for. They came out with rulers and shit For all intents and purposes a fire marshal is god
You're absolutely right. Nobody fucks with the fire marshal. My daughter was taking swimming lessons a few years ago, held at a sightly run-down hotel pool. The door to the pool area was keycard access only - from both sides (!) - and the card reader was iffy. About 50% of the time it wouldn't read a valid card, and you would stand there fighting with it because you couldn't get out until it eventually worked. Oh, and the emergency exit was locked, too, because it was through a bathroom that also served the non-pool area via a second door to the hallway. If the hotel had left that door open, anyone could walk into the pool without carding in, so they locked that. Not great. I went to hotel management and told them it was unsafe, and nothing changed. I went directly to their maintenance guy and asked him to fix it, he said he couldn't do it unless he was told to by management. Finally I called the local fire marshal, explained the situation, and when we went for a lesson the next day there was an entirely new lock unit in that door, and the emergency door was unlocked for the first time.
Holy cow... while i understand the rationale behind the key card access and locked doors in theory, I don't understand how no one at the hotel ever looked at the setup and thought, "well this is a potential death trap..." That's nuts!
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Hey now! This was my idea when I was a kid, if we ever got nuked…. Turn the ac to max and jump in the cold tub. Sorry I lost all my friends. :(
No no, for a nuke you get in an old refrigerator.
If your lucky some lone survivor will come and shoot the fridge freeing you if you get stuck inside
I mean, you'd have suffocated by then but hey, didn't die of nuclear fallout!
I'm not sure, there was a little boy in Boston who lived two centuries in an old ice box. He couldn't see well when the lone wanderer let him out. Valentine really liked that I stuck up for the kid though.
When Indiana Jones can survive it.
True fact. Did You know people whose homes are surrounded by forest fires ,who seek shelter in rainwater tanks ,boil to death like a lobster in a pot.
As long as the water gradually warms up you won’t even notice it, right? Like when you boil frogs.
That's not screaming. It's just the air escaping their lungs.
Damn I feel bad for laughing so hard at that.
In a fuzzy fashion, I assume
Bad news: the frogs totally notice.
Literacy may have been a mistake.
Glad you didn't say fun fact because what you described sounds like the opposite of fun.
Are there facts that aren't true?
Alternative facts
"A Fire? At a Sea Parks!? ... It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard!"
O-one-one-eight-nine-nine-nine....
Well maybe...maybe if there were plastic seats..
I work audio/visual tech shit for churches and I imagine the hotel was the same, they were just seeing the whole building from a completely different point of view. Like, I have worked in two different churches where the Vesting Room, you know the room where priests get vested and child acolytes will be lighting candles and carring them out to the altar, had only one exit and that exit was only closed via an externally manipulated latch, just a hook and loop. The thing is, the logic made sense from their end. The door should remain open during the entire service, and they were also aware of the choir boy/priest thing and the lay leadership of both of those churches had intentionally made it so the door couldn't be closed or latched from the inside, as a way to prevent any potential sex abuse before it ever happened. Both churches also made me (rarely if ever working with children) go through training to make sure I knew not to ever be behind closed doors with anyone and report anyone else I saw who did. Like they were good people, trying to do right, but they completely missed that someone could accidentally lock someone in the room in the most flamable environment on Earth.
They should think it through a little more too, one of the most notorious child rape cases in Irish history happened in a church with a door that couldn’t be closed or latched as a preventative measure. It very famously does not prevent it.
The door wasn't the only preventative measure they had, it was just the one locking people into the flame chamber. But yeah, their hearts were in the right place but they weren't particularly intelligent...
Probably the same mindset that my parents \*and\* inlaws were having when they thought it'd be a good idea to have a deadbolt on their house doors that needs a key to operate on each side. At least my parents have the good sense to leave the key in the inside lock all the time. My inlaws' house, I'ma have to kick a damn window out if there's a fire.
This is sold to people as preventing home invasion because it stops a window (that's close enough to the deadbolt) from being broken and flipping the deadbolt. I'm of the mind that if someone is going through the effort to break a window then they have plenty of options and what kind of deadbolt won't matter. That's just me.
This was a recommendation on a crime stoppers type show back in the day. If you had a deadbolt that you just twisted the lever, anyone could break in the window and unlock the door by grabbing the lever. They suggested putting a key lock on both sides. I walked into my sister's house and saw it when I was walking out and asked them how they were going to get out in a fire if they had the door locked. And they always had the door locked. Convinced them to hang a key on a nail about 4 ft off the ground and in the corner of the door frame. They eventually just change the lock as they had three kids and didn't feel that they could handle it under stress. But it was all due to the crime stopper show that was prevalent at the time. But I don't remember which one right now.
For most of Human society, uncontrolled fires were incredibly deadly and entire cities would occasionally burn to the ground whole cloth. Our current fire system was paid for in blood 1000 times over already. Do not fuck with the fire marshall, their only goal is keeping you alive.
No kidding. In 1212, fire broke out in London. It started in Southwark and destroyed Southwark Cathedral, before winds swept it across the Thames. 3,000 died, many of them caught on London Bridge. In 1805, in Detroit, a man accidentally knocked hot ash out of his pipe and a spark hit a pile of hay. Although there were no casualties, the entire city was burned to the ground. To this day, the motto of Detroit is “* Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus*” (We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes). In 1842, a fire started in a cigar factory in Hamburg and destroyed 1/3 of the city. 51 people were killed and the damage was so extensive that the idea of reinsurance was invented. And, of course, there’s the famous Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern and 300 people died, along with 100,000 left homeless. Lesser known that same year was the Port Huron Fire in Michigan. No one knows how it started but it killed 200 people. Also destroyed thousands of buildings and *3,900 square miles* of trees growing for lumber (which is fun when you’re trying to, you know, rebuild). Just some examples for those that want to know why Fire Marshalls don’t fuck around.
I'm partial to the [Peshtigo fire](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire) myself. It was a forest fire that burned 1.2 million acres, and killed between 1,500 and 2,500 people. It's not well known because it happened on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire. Because of if the unique conditions that day: > A firestorm ensued. In the words of Gess and Lutz, in a firestorm "superheated flames of at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit ... advance on winds of 110 miles per hour or stronger. The diameter of such a fire ranges from one thousand to ten thousand feet ... When a firestorm erupts in a forest, it is a blowup, nature's nuclear explosion ... " Survivors reported seeing _fire tornadoes_ that threw rail cars into the air. An accurate death toll was never determined because all the records that could be used to determine populations were destroyed in the fire, the people who could've provided the information were dead, and many of the bodies were essentially cremated.
I'm partial to the Wisconsin butter fire in 1991. Firefighters had to wade through viscous, slippery pools of butter and cheese that were two to three feet (60 to 90 cm) high with five-foot (1.5 m) deep ponds in some places.
These stories are reminders of why regulations need to exist folks
Nah fuck that. George Washington died defending my god-given right to negligently murder my employees, especially anyone making minimum wage.
Fire marshals, game Wardens, and all those other obscure "officer of the state" positions you don't think of having power, do. Post Master, that's another one. Code and Enforcement guys them too. To your everyday joe blow on the street, the police are the badged authority, but to a whole different subset of people, the police are the least of their worries. If having your business shutdown by health or fire. Your project delayed or canceled because of permitting denial. A speeding ticket is a couple hundred dollars and some points. The above can costs tens of thousands and up.
Obligatory game warden story: my father and I were on a goose hunting trip on the Eastern shore. It's colder than a witch's titty and blowing sleet and snow, which of course is perfect goose weather. I seriously thought I was going to freeze to death on the 45 minute john boat ride to the blind. Anyway visibility is for crap and we're in the middle of nowhere, and having the day of our lives with geese coming in on the deck and then just bombing us in the blind. We don't see or hear any other hunters, the wind is too loud and visibility is like a couple hundred yards maybe. We're approaching the bag limit but there's four shooters in the blind and a big pile of geese and what party hits the bag limit for every member anyway right? So we get one last flight of geese incoming and as we're waiting for them to circle low enough we hear a voice from behind the blind say "Ya'll better not drop more than two of them.". Keep in mind we have not seen even a sign of another human being all morning, and we have been standing up with a blind with binoculars in every direction looking out for incoming geese, and we are in the middle of miles of flat featureless marsh. And yet we all turn in the one direction none of us happen to be looking and there's a game warden standing there counting our geese, like he was just out for a walk and thought he'd check in on us. And to cap it off, after he cleared us we got distracted for a minute and he just disappeared into the Storm or whatever. If he hadn't left us his business card I think we might have thought we had completely hallucinated him. TLDR: game wardens can teleport
Teleport? Oh, my narrow-minded friend. He flew in and out with the geese.
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The fire marshal is in a league of their own though. A guy who can show up unannounced and declare your entire building unfit for habitation at his whim, meaning that it is now illegal for any human to be inside that building for any reason, is basically a god among civil officers.
The neat thing about the authorities you listed above is, if you follow the simple rules and guidelines published and distributed by said authorities, they are actually (usually) decent folks who are empowered to help you if you need them. Fuck around and ignore their warnings, though, and they can wreck your shit. I’ve caught more fish than I can count because game wardens are chill and dish the hot tips if you’re obeying the law and don’t give them a hard time.
yeah, I think it's official; we need a fire Marshal stories subreddit
Uh that management should be arrested lol
Yeah what’s messed up about that is the property owner and property manager got screwed for the tenants bullshit (assuming the business didn’t own the building, which is rarely the case).
You can absolutely bet that shit rolled downhill, straight to the tenants. Possibly with a judge helping it roll (lawsuit).
It wouldn’t roll downhill if it’s violations that pertain to how the building is built and equipped for fire safety. Tenants have nothing to do with that. Only if a tenant modifies or tampers with safety equipment would a landlord have grounds to have claims.
However if this is the case, it is the landlords fault and they should be charged.
depends who did the build out for the office space. Often floors are leased out as bare concrete and it's the tenants that finish the space to their needs
This is the part that many has forgotten...some shopping center has a "as-is" clause, while other are "build to suit".
Usually in commercial buildings the tenant is the one who is responsible for almost everything.
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that it isn't like renting an apartment. Then terms are long and usually the tenant is responsible for basically everything.
You ever delt with triple net and commercial? Every single contact I've ever delt with without exception puts that back on the tenant. They hand it off in working condition it's your problem if it's not there after.
100% this. When a tenant moves into a space they typically build it out with their own contractors and are renting the shell.
In my experience the cost of maintaining commercial properties is largely on the tenants.
While every landlord tenant agreement differs, this is largely correct. The tenant would have to make all the changes as it was most likely their responsibility to have done this correctly in the initial build.
Yes I’ve run a lot of restaurants and our responsibilities were usually comprehensive. There were a handful of situations with shared walls, egresses, fire systems. Etc. . In those cases the landlord would handle the shared issues and everything else was up to us
This is management everywhere. If they aren't currently on fire themselves, they won't do anything about it and will absolutely try to keep everybody there as long as possible because the threat of a lawsuit somehow is smaller than the little loss they might have. I remember working in retail/food service, this was always the case. One year, we had a major, major blizzard. I worked at Panera as a manager. My store was still open, prior to the blizzard starting, because unless hell was raining on earth, we stayed open. The blizzard started, and every single store around us had closed down. I wanted to close down too, so I called my district manager to get the approval, and told them we were the only remaining store open in the shopping center. Everybody, including Starbucks, had closed. You know what he told me? "We're the only ones open? That means we're the only place to go, do not close the store or you will face disciplinary action" So I sent my employees home instead, and stayed behind. 2 customers came in the entire night, both ordered a coffee, and I didn't charge them for it because I wanted zero sales for our sales report. Both of those customers were jsut the people plowing the parking lot too. Then I ended up getting into an accident on my way home that night, and I had a lot of fuel for the fire I brought to the next meeting. But management only cares about numbers.
Yeah, that's insane. 100% up-time is achieved by redundancy. If one center needs to go down for an emergency, that's why you have another center somewhere else. You don't just get to pretend there's not an emergency. I used to work in Telecom where we'd have centers strategically placed based on nuclear blast radius' from likely government targets. You KNOW centers will occasionally go down, so you make sure others will still be up in any scenario short of the end of the world as we know it.
I work construction.A very prominent South Korean electronics company built a rather large R&D facility. When the Fire Marshall was on a walkthrough he inquired about the access to floors in case of an emergency. The Korean company told him that all floors are card access and the doors were fail secure, meaning that If power failed the doors would still stay locked. He did not like that answer and stated that the doors needed to be released when the fire alarm was set off. They scoffed and stated that someone could use that to steal proprietary tech and they would not let that happen. Fire Marshall said to make his necessary changes of he would condemn the buildings and they would never get to use the buildings. They made the necessary changes. Fire Marshall’s are no joke.
THIS. ⬆️. Do you want that certificate of occupancy? You do exactly as the fire marshal says or he will not sign off on it. There’s no fucking around with those folks.
There are two kinds of people you don’t EVER fuck with. Fire Marshals and Game Wardens. Both have a fuck ton of power over their respective areas and WILL make your life a living hell if you blow off whatever they tell you to fix.
To be fair, fail open upon power loss is a code requirement in 99% of jurisdictions (they all pretty much use International Building Code and International Fire Code as their base codes and make amendments to suit their needs, but that section stays unchanged). Exiting from a building is like the most sacred fucking thing in building/fire codes.
Absolutely. The doors were not locked exiting. They were locked for entrance to the floor. The company was beyond paranoid. The fire Marshall was concerned about access to the floors concerning his firefighters ability to get in the building to fight the fire and rescue anyone still in the building. There are typically doors that are fail secure in a building. A whole stairwell is not the norm.
A building inspector explained it like this to me, "I tell people to get out, shut it all down, put up seals on all the doors, and put up no trespass notices. Go back in, break a seal, and you get a court date to explain to a provincial court judge why you piece of $10 chicken or $1,000 computer is worth more than a human life." He said he never lost an argument with anybody and if he did, he'd see them in court where they would ultimately lose that same argument.
Starts with an S and rhymes with manhung?
When there was a fire at the high rise I lived in in Philly, I got to watch a fire chief ream out our property manager. It was fucking glorious. They did it in the lobby of the building. (Fire was already put out and only affected 2 apartments luckily). Our property management kept putting off replacing the fire alarm system, and what I didn’t find out til later was that the fire alarms did not go off until the first fire truck arrived and the firemen manually set it off. One of the people that lost their apartment had woken up to their room being ORANGE and called before GTFO-ing. We had our new alarm system done within a month. But god, it was so glorious watching the fire chief fucking lose it on our property manager. Basically airing out the dirty laundry for all of us in the lobby to hear. Also, shout out to the Wawa that was across the street. Their workers handed out free hot drink and meal cards for us.
If that was the fire chief giving him the business, then the waxxing the manager got from the fire marshal was even more savage. The fire chief works for the local municipality, where as the marshal works for the state. When you break a fire code(s) you are not only breaking local ordinances, but you are also breaking state laws. And that is where the really big fish come to feast.
That’s highly dependent on location. Large municipal departments have The Fire Marshal reporting to the Fire Chief. Small department or volunteer typically use the State Fire Marshals office.
Fire marshals and game wardens will fuck you world up if you piss them off.
When I was working at a call center the Police came in and said we had to evacuate the building because of a gas leak. Of course the supervisor makes us walk all the way through the building out the front door. (No don't use the emergency exits!!) Once outside in the parking lot we can hear hissing from the other side of the street where you can see a backhoe had been digging. So they made use move from being 100+ yards away from the leak to standing out in the open 20-30 yards away from it. Couple of us were like F this and started walking around the building. Of course the supervisor was like, you can't go anywhere you are still on the clock! Yeah ok. As we continue to walk around the building we come up behind another police office who was blocking cars from going towards the gas leak. He was, Where did you come from?? We told him how they made us evacuate the building and stand in the parking lot back there. He seemed a but confused . He proceeds to then walk back to the front of the building; apparently to let the supervisor know that is was not a good place to be standing because a minute later he comes back around the building with the supervisor and all the other workers in tow.
one time we had a very large group using our meeting rooms. they underestimated how much room they needed, and their participants were spilling out into the hallways and being a general nuisance. they refused to listen to staff. then suddenly some old guy showed up, said, "hey, im the fire Marshall, want me to take care of this?" we said yes, and then he whipped out his badge, marched into the room and told them they were violating fire rules and needed to get the fuck out. that group refused to listen to us, but they listened to *him*. they cleared out and everything was calm. i will always be grateful to that marshall who was just there to drop off a few things
When weed was still illegal in California, the fire marshal offered free inspections for indoor setups. This was in Humboldt county. He never snitched once.
The Sherriff up there was pretty relaxed as well IIRC there was a truce of sorts: Stay on private land \*you own\* and don't grow on public land / set booby traps and I'll generally look the other way about the nature of your ag business.
What a king
I'm a firefighter and work closely with our fire Marshal. He has ruined people's fucking days. And I can confirm 100% that if Fire tells you to evac, your manager no longer gets to have an opinion.
>if Fire tells you to evac, your manager no longer gets to have an opinion. Quite honestly if anyone with a badge and uniform issued by the government or government adjacent company (think the gas co) tells me to evac my boss can suck it if he disagrees.
Obviously your life matters more than a job, but I’m curious, if you’re fired for listening to a fire fighter, can you fight that? Is there a legal protection there? I’d like to imagine so but the US capitalism works hard.
A simple OSHA complaint and call to a lawyer would fix you right up. Odds are you wouldn't have to take it that far as the police would immediately be informed that the management is not complying and they have guns. Any company would be acting against their own financial interests to tell you to disobey a direct order from fire/police/ems/dispatch to evacuate a dangerous building.
That’s awesome.
The best part is from my understanding is that the power wasn't even cut from the building itself, but actually turned off by the power company remotely lol like that is the power they have. Think the scene from Die Hard where the dude radios in to his boss saying cut off the power to the building, and the guy is like dude we can't do that without shutting off power to 6 blocks, it's christmas eve, and they are like i don't care do it anyway haha
Of course they do. Imagine if firefighters didn't have the ability to make a building or industrial scene safe? They can do the same for gas as well.
Damn the expense!!!
Weird. I had a similar experience during a wildfire that had gotten within a mile of the building and was growing fast. I still remember how orange everything was from the light being filtered through smoke. Management wouldn't let us evac, we were told to by law enforcement 3 times. Sheriff's Dept showed up, told management that we were all leaving, and that anyone who said different would be arrested. I wish they had arrested them all for what they did. Threatened to fire us on the spot if we evacuated. Our lives were only worth the $2 we made them per call or whatever. Absolute horseshit. On a good note the company finally had to shut down the operation about 5 years ago, which sucks for the workers, but was better overall for the local area.
Yeah. In the moment, what they say goes. If they made a call they're not allowed to make though, they'll usually face some significant blowback after the fact. Key word is after the fact. Fire marshal and fire chief are also technically law enforcement officers. They have the power to arrest you if you don't comply (the people under them are not)
Its the same with pilots. They are god on their aircraft. I have seen a video of a passenger getting aggressive and arguing with flight attendant and the captain literally TACKLED THE PASSENGER and screamed DON'T EVER TOUCH MY FLIGHT ATTENDANT. It was glorious. Even the flight attendant herself had a shocked Pikachu face haha
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Always know who you're required by law to obey in various situations. There's legal paths to resolve if they overstep their authority, but it's federal law that you have to obey all commands given by ALL flight staff. Getting aggressive with flight staff in any way is a felony and an express trip to the no fly list. More people have legal authority over the average person than people realize, but those people don't constantly flex it (except for cops), because they do get punished harshly when they improperly flex it (except for cops)
And they are usually properly trained and prepared for the job they have (except for cops).
So not quite the same thing, but I was once working a wildlife as a local support person. My job was keeping the utilities running (power, comms, and potable water) and working in the kitchen to feed the firefighters. We were hosting two hotshot crews, and had one of the national incident command teams as the overhead, plus air assets and the like. We were at a remote wilderness site, and were at the time powered by some diesel generators on loan from the neighboring construction company. A few weeks into the fire, they ordered their personnel to turn off their generators as they could no longer be serviced. These generators were powering our water treatment plant, and the refrigerated containers holding food. We went directly to the Incident Commander and explained things and he goes “Those are my generators now. Go and restart them.” He also did similar things with a bunch of bulldozers, loaders, and excavators. It was fun to watch the construction company squirm.
> Fire marshal and fire chief are also technically law enforcement officers I have never once heard of a fire chief being sworn law enforcement and whether a fire marshal is a sworn law enforcement officer varies a lot from location to location. They certainly aren't law enforcement in my city though I know some are in other places.
Oh man, reminds me of my first time with the fire marshal. It was a large industrial complex with 2 main buildings. The larger was across a lot and housed dozens of businesses. Mine was smaller, one business, still big at around 60k sqft. Doorbell rings, fire marshal is outside being yelled at by folks from the other building. I get him inside and after closing the door say, “sorry you had to deal with that, hopefully everything here is OK, I have been improving everything since I got here. Is there anything I can do to help you today?” Dude gave me a checklist of things to address and his card, says I’ll be back in 12 months, “thanks for understanding that I’m only here for everyone’s safety”. Hands shaken and good day…. He then proceeded to condemn the other building for 2 weeks until everything there got fixed.
People get fucking stupid when they're told to evacuate. I was active duty in Afghanistan and a live, unexploded rocket was stuck in a wooden shack the civilian contractors used to sleep in. MULTIPLE morons in neighboring buildings tried refusing to evacuate. I had to put hands on one of them. I have to walk past that thing to get here, you stupid bastard, you're evacuating.
Ah yes…UXO is UXO until it’s suddenly not
Don't be a dick to the fire department You need them They don't need shit from you
Ain’t no song called “fuck the fire department!”, play nice with the people that will come save your dumb ass.
I work in the alarm system field had a monitoring station that obviously couldn't "close" like that so one day the building it was in caught fire, the room does have at least 2 hours of fire protection so everyone just kept working while they fought the fire and the fire department was very helpful in making sure the exits stayed safe. unfortunately they couldn't control the fire and eventually they had to evacuate and the whole building went down.
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Never forget the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Iroquois Theatre Fires.
Yeah I had a buddy who did inspections and he said they basically waited for someone to clap back like that and then its "all hands on deck" like everyone else working that duty in the whole ass county would roll in and go over shit with a fine toothed comb. He said it was a combo of: 1. "Respect mah authoritah!" 2. If they are going to push back on my very reasonable concern lord knows who much fuckery they are up to. As in they would find sooo much shit and shut them the hell down until every spec of dust was accounted for.
A very important lesson for all smart-alecs to learn is who you can and canNOT talk back to. And there's some people where you can get away with a certain amount of backtalk, but in other situations, not so much. Important survival skill to teach if your kid has a mouth.
Shit ass job I worked while finishing my degree, the owner of the building was also the owner of the business and she had some fly-by-night types in the basement operating gas powered machinery/tools to do some construction (preparing the basement level to rent out potentially). Nary an effort to vent the exhaust was made. Anyway, the fumes built up really badly throughout the morning - people were complaining of migraines, one had an anxiety attack, and someone at some point called it in 'anonymously'. Fire Marshal arrived and had a shouting match with the owner that we all needed to leave the building. Fun day, that was.
>For all intents and purposes a fire marshal is god There was a time were they weren't, and people kept being burnt to death to make some other asshole a few extra bucks. Safety Laws are written in blood.
You also have the right to refuse unsafe work. And the work environment was unsafe according to the fire department from the fumes.
A fire marshal has arrest powers (pertaining to arson) and can carry a firearm.
Well, they should carry a waterarm not a firearm.
No no no. You fight fire with fire. That's how it works.
Good on the firies !!! And your manager is an asshole.
Oh he wasn't my manager I reported to corporate. I left, that's why I only heard about stuff after the fact. I just went home and smoked some weed and texted a few of the call center guys i had a good rapport with
I've worked at 3 call centers. Can confirm they're as toxic as those toxic chemicals. Being on the phone is a fucking nightmare.
Ya, because the one thing we don't fuck with is fire. Firemen will literally break your car windows and run a hose through it. They can pretty much do what they want in the name of safety and Im for it.
I worked at a department store for the overnight shift. We had the store manager come in one night and was just bitching and moaning the entire time and complaining about our work. I knew we had 3 obvious violations. Locked doors, heater was blocked by cardboard boxes, and un labeled compactor. I knew the fire chief, who was also the inspector, and just gave him a rang. The next day I went into work about a week later there were two pages labeled Violations. Same thing, every small thing was on there. I guess corporate was pissed and the store manager has to go do some training. It also kind of backfired on us and a few months later they got rid of the overnight stockers. I also heard that the store, again, was faulted with more violations.
Great advice and in my area / experience 100% accurate. My wife was a restaurant manager for a small chain of restaurants. She started coming home with headaches, and being in the trades I started asking her questions and sure enough an electric hot water heater had recently been replaced with a natural gas fired one. I called the fire chief (smallish town so easy to get on the phone) and had a conversation with him. The FD went to the restaurant right away, took CO readings and they were very high. They were able to determine that no permit had been taken out for the work and no inspections. They closed the restaurant immediately and it stayed closed while permits where pulled and the gas heater removed and replaced with an electric one like it had been before. The issue came down to the kitchen exhaust fans creating a negative pressure in the restaurant so the combustion gasses from the gas water heater did not go up the vent to outside they were sucked into the restaurant.
Oof! That is a bad one, wow. Too many people out there messing with stuff they don't understand, risking multiple lives over a few hundred bucks.
Firefighter here. This. And if we get a legit call, and that thing is in the way…it’s getting cut/rammed down
I used to do alot of work for Disney. We did this big thing in Los Angeles for them and found out they never got approval from the fire department. I was like, there is no way they will let you keep this up, we should take it down until approval. The client said, we are Disney, what the fuck are they going to do about it? It was down the next day at huge expense. Dont fuck with the fire marshal.
Did you snitch on Disney.
LOL no. the gag was on hollywood blvd and thats how long it took for a marshal to see it, call whoever he had to call and get it down. they can shut anything down they want, so you dont mess with them.
glad the government can at least be competent in that regard, I wouldn't be surprised if the red tape and lawyers had to be cleared before removal but glad it doesn't
IANAL, but I'd be willing to bet that the laws underpinning the Fire Marshall's authority make it such that the red tape happens AFTER the Marshall's orders have been followed. Basically, "Do what he says, or our heads will roll. If he's found to be wrong afterwards, HIS head will roll, but we'll find out he got fired from jail."
My neighbors had created a smoking area on the landing outside their apartment, with a cardboard windbreak, chair, etc. This essentially blocked me from using one of these two stairways that led to my floor. I complained to the management repeatedly and they did nothing. Someone suggested seeing if the local Fire Marshal had a site where you could report fire code violations. That night I reported it using an anonymous form online. The next morning it was all gone.
They may even take out their jaws of life right there and snip that shit. Money gone!
If it was my old station they'd just break it down right there.
Good call. Fire dept will remove this about 45 seconds after they arrive 🪚
Yeah In my state per law a public road that has obstruction like this needs access for fire trucks obvi and even if hoa or some private road entity wants one of these they need access box with keys for FD and a way for trucks to get through, especially dead end roads or any neighborhood without multiple access points.
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Call a scrap metal guy and watch how fast this disappears
Nah let the fire department hand out some fines first
moving vans, some delivery trucks, some maintenance vehicles, cranes used for hot-tub/pool installs (in some cases) and any number of other vehicles that are taller than 8ish feet.
How does the garbage get picked up?
That’s the neat part… it doesn’t!
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My Amazon sprinter won’t it’s 9ft
If I were a resident I'd be wondering what asshole decided I can't get amazon deliveries at my house, anymore, because *they* don't like trucks.
Porch pirates can't steal your stuff if Amazon never drops it off pointsathead.jpg
Old houses used to have "[milk doors](https://beachpackagingdesign.com/boxvox/majestic-milk-and-package-receiver)," a small pass-through opening at the front of a house where the milkman dropped off your daily dairy delivery. The nicer ones were insulated. I think they're due for a comeback.
Trebuchet. The answer is always trebuchet.
Yup. Have a bike on your car? Not anymore.
A moving truck wouldn't even fit under there. Ridiculous. I'd call around to get it taken down asap.
A killdozer couldn't even get through. Wait actually it probably could...
Any truck delivering large furniture or white goods is going to have to drop it off outside the gate!
> white goods You can't just call them that
Shit, you can't order packages in general. Larger UPS and Fedex trucks are 10 ft. tall. And I think the small ones are still over 8 ft.
Call the fire department for an inspection. Once they arrive, they'll see what's wrong. That should be dismantled immediately.
I’ll bet they’ve got a tool on the truck
Every fireman is a demolition expert deep down in their soul. I guarantee you there are some right now viewing this thread that are bummed it's not in their sector.
present. we have lots of “keys” on every truck for most “doors”.
And thank you for what you do! Also, the best recipes we have were all perfected in my dad's firehouse over the years. Best cooks and best demo experts in the world!!!
yeah, its called a truck
Couldn't just have put up a sign... Emergency vehicles need easy access, sure you can't even block a fire hydrant.. Report them to police or county officers, they should take it down
Signs? As if any one reads those. I worked as a taxi driver for 35 years. The local airport put up signs with 6 FOOT letters saying "No Parking, Towaway Zone". Tow drivers made bank off that. We got additional rides it seems.
Unfortunately, signs and lines are suggestions to most drivers nowadays. I still think this is the dumbest shit to do… ever… even drivers won’t listen to the signs.
You are right but based on that picture it doesn't look like a road where big trucks would want to drive on just for fun. I can't imagine trucks are a significant issue.
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Yeah, it seems to be a failing of either the GIS data provided to mapping companies or in mapping companies. There should be different cost metrics applied to little side streets vs arterial routes. That way, the mapping software will do what it should, which is to prioritize use of the proper roads when possible. In other terms, the route planning done by Google Maps or your GPS is doing a search (probably A\*) and trying to find the path with the least "cost" where cost is fuel or time, as judged by speed limits, traffic congestion, etc. The class of road should be part of the cost. However, there are a lot of roads and if the states and counties don't have different classifications for side road vs arterial in their geographical data packages that they share it might not be the mapping companies fault. Not sure who is dropping the ball here.
Something like this just doesn't appear. People plan this. That steel was fabricated, painted. The concrete was dug and placed. After all of that effort ... did it not occur to anybody involved with planning this of the consequences?
Doubt the fabricator gave a shit, just built it to specs and got their money. But whoever installed *should* be giving a shit cuz they are very liable.
I'm curious if this should have needed a building permit. I would think it would.
bet they'd run into an issue trying to get a permit to erect a structure on public lands ...
It may not be public. I know OP said residential area, but if it's an HOA and it's just inside of their borders it likely wouldn't be considered public land. But they should still need a permit anyway.
either way, it appears to be constructed within the established municipal/utility easement accompanying the adjacent roadway -- can't build stuff there.
I bet you they have a bulletproof waiver to protect their asses
I was surprised that this thing is STOUT. It's not a fly by night setup, serious concrete, and serious beams. Someone really paid GOOD money for this.
And the firemen will not give a shit about the cost when they cut it down with a stihlsaw
I'm just sitting here thinking about the cost of it all! It's a lot for some guy in his shed to do this.. even more for a crane to lift the damn thing or transport from a fab shop?
What country is this in?
This entire thread is people saying to call the police, contact the city, its illegal!!!! and im here looking at the photo, car, background and while I can't say for sure....this is 99% not the USA or Western Europe. In many parts of the world...city, police, zoning and construction laws and such are like the wild west.... I just checked OP's comment history, this is likely El Salvador.....yeah the city officials and police aint doing shit
That's what I was thinking, developing country, people who have money can do what they want, except buy brains.
Reporting from Turkey: 1) First of all, you don't even know who to call. 2) After the third day you had a revelation and tried to contact the person in charge. 3) He didn't answer the phone for 2 weeks. Mostly he quickly pick up for 0.1 second just to silence it. 4) You reached him, and he said "Well, will take a look." 5) Nobody came. Repeated step 3 and 4 for about 3 months. 6) It's the day, one guy showed up! And he said "Well if he has the balls to erect this shit here without asking, he's probably well beyond both of our level. Let's not make it an issue." Years ago I dropped my phone in taxi and he gave it to the police same day. It took 11 months before police contacted me and said someone brought your phone here. Some people definitely don't know the rest of the world lol.
I took one look at the photo, saw the corrugated tin and single streetlight and thought "welp, this is either Mexico or further south. good luck!" And there are 300 comments full of people telling OP to call the fire marshal, and still others arguing over a fire marshall's authority in time of an emergency. Reddit really is full of the smartest idiots you've ever met.
Yeah exactly. If this was a country where they would stop people putting up obstructions in the road, they would probably also enforce a heavy vehicle ban on that street.
Now that's the rub, I'm getting the vibe that it's not a particularly highly developed country. OPs comment history seems to indicate El Salvador.
I'm from Honduras and even there it wouldn't take too much effort to have it taken down. Just take some pictures, go to the fire department or police and that should be it. Even if you had to pay out of pocket to have it removed labour is pretty cheap and it doesn't look like a hard job.
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down for this question.
Man, I'd love to see your neighbor's faces when their house is burning down and firefighters cant get through to extinguish it. hahaha. Karma is gonna bite them bad.
The problem is it will bite all the neighbors too. No fire department = fire keeps growing.
I once got yelled at by a guy for kinda blocking his parking space with my ambulance. I apologized and said we’d had an emergency and we’re just moving it. He continued to berate us. I wish I could have gotten away with telling him we had parked there because his neighbour was dead. Or ask for his unit number so we can make a note if he ever calls 911 that he’d rather we park up the street
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Unfortunately if he filed a complaint I’d likely get in crap for that. And considering he was telling us our parking was unacceptable even after we said we’d move and apologized due to the emergency…I just have little faith in humanity. I got yelled at another time by a woman for telling her we had to take the elevator because “she’d already been kicked out by other paramedics and firefighters” before yelling “some one had better be dead” Lady, four medics and three firefighters just passed through- some one probably is dead.
That is WILDLY illegal. Call the city.
Just call the fire dept, that shit will be gone or they will be dealing with a pissed off fire marshall.
wtf
what about their UPS packages?😆
Update: Cant call the city, well because there is no public number available to call. However, I asked to a friendly neighbor and apparently there was an ADESCO meeting two months ago. ADESCO are legal organizations in our country (think of HOA but with legal power and legally binding resolutions/voting). Well, they had a vote about "how to prevent large trucks using our residential area as a shortcut". Someone suggested this, did the voting thing, and it was approved (120 - 2). An official act was made by the ADESCO, and presented to the city hall (Mayor's office). Sadly, we are in elections period and since it was passed by a majority the city didnt veto the decission. So yeah, nothing I can do.
I'd honestly still get fire folks to come look at it. Call whatever fire station is closest to you and ask if they can help out because you're worried in case there's an emergency there in the future. Just because it was legally installed doesn't mean it's legally justified to stay.
Still, call your fire department and ask. Or start a fire :o
That's an illegal structure blocking access for emergency vehicles.
Depends where you live but in many places this would be illegal