Death Traps R Us

I’ve just spent two days in Hefei, doing some collaboration work with a research group at Anhui University. They’ll be building a temperature and precipitation dataset like I did for my masters degree over two years ago.

Here’s a picture of the fire exit in the hall outside of the hotel room where I stayed on campus. The double door is situated at the end of the long hallway.

Yep, that’s right. That’s a bicycle lock threaded through the two door handles. So, when I first checked in, I thought I’d entertain myself and ask the staff to unlock the door for my safety. For one thing, the Chinese characters on the sign above the door translate into “Safety Exit”. I didn’t expect them to honour my request, but I wanted to see what would happen if I insisted. I had a good laugh when they responded by saying: “It will be less safe for you if we unlock the door.” I told my translator to tell them, “No, you’re wrong.” I should get an honourary degree in cross-cultural diplomatic relations for coming up with that one. I stood my ground for a few more minutes, but I didn’t bother getting angry. I mean, I really didn’t have to because I wasn’t taking it personally, nor did I expect them to do anything anyway. But one of the staff members involved in the conversation with the “crazy foreign devil” was smart enough to realize that a person could fit through the open doors when the lock stretched to full length. So they took me back upstairs from the front desk and we opened the two doors so that I could see that a person of my stature could fit his head, and hence his body, through the space between the two restricted doors. I told them that was good enough and that I was satisfied. Of course, I then wondered how having this more-or-less useless lock there in the first place made me “more safe”? I guess it would keep someone from sneaking a lion into my room while I was sleeping. But what about a smaller animal that was just as hungry?

Anyway, this is just a typical example of the state of fire safety in buildings in China. The lock wasn’t even a problem, really. I inspected the doors before making my request and realized that even a ten-year old could kick the doors open if necessary. All over China actually, and here in my hotel room, any windows on the first and second floors are covered by bars that are bolted to the concrete door frames. The only way to bust them open is with a moving car and a strong cable. That, or a half-stick of dynamite. (I keep a half-stick in my backpack just for this purpose!) Sometimes they even bar the windows on the third floor. Most fire exits are treated as potential entry points and are thus locked. Typically, they are used as storage closets too. In the case of the hotel, I suspect they are trying to prevent television sets and furniture from walking off. But anyway, when I hear that dozens of people die in a building fire in China, I am never surprised. Death traps are endemic despite being 100% preventable.

Yet through my little stunt in challenging the hotel staff, I didn’t actually get any closer to understanding how the Chinese think about fire safety. Well, okay, I can infer a lot from the fact that everyone who joined in the conversation burst into laughter—laughing directly at me, in fact. There was a hotel fire in my neighbourhood last month and about nine people died. So my office decided we needed to replace all the powerbars in the room (the supposed cause of the hotel fire) with brand new ones. But we still keep the doors on most floors propped open to the stairwells. (This is hazardous because smoke will spread from the floor that is on fire and prevent people on all floors from using the stairs—the only way of escape.) So I don’t have much faith in their reactionary way of doing things. It’s not going to make a lasting difference. It never does. So to the people laughing at me over the fire exit request, “See you in hell” should have been my response. It’s a literal possibility from my point of view.