On March 4, 1908, a fire erupted at Lakeview Elementary School in Collinwood, Ohio. Among the frightened students was 9-year-old Niles Thompson, who, in a desperate attempt to escape the flames, lept from a second-story window. Recovering from his fall, Niles frantically searched the stream of fleeing students for his little brother, Thomas. Unable to find him, Niles ran back into the burning building.
The two Thompson brothers died, along with 170 other children. Nineteen were so badly burned that their bodies could not be identified.
These deaths were preventable. As a result of regulations prompted by the Lakeview fire, along with several other conflagrations, building materials are now fire-resistant, and most schools are equipped with smoke alarms, sprinklers, and extinguishers. These regulations make schools incredibly safe — so safe that fire drills might be overkill. Is it time to start dialing back?
Joseph Millan, Fire Life Safety Director at my high school, Avenues, thinks so. He calls them “obsolete,” noting that new technology and building materials make fires small and response times fast. “No one really has caught up with that.”
While the image of Niles Thompson is hard to shake, we need to analyze the situation logically. New York schools are legally required to have eight evacuation drills a year. I found that these drills take roughly 30 minutes, not including the time it takes to refocus afterward. Collectively, New York’s 2.4 million K-12 students will spend 9.6 million hours a year doing fire drills instead of learning. That’s 14 lifetimes!
Students aren’t the only ones paying a price. At $35,000 a year per student — or $28 an hour — drills cost taxpayers $268 million a year. The national cost is in the billions.
But at least they’re saving lives. Right?
No.
Using National Fire Incident Reporting System data, I found that the annual likelihood of a school building fire during school hours is 1 in 5,000 (excluding confined fires that can be extinguished without the fire department).
Even in the rare event that a fire happens, they’re not particularly dangerous: the death rate is so low that FEMA rounds it to zero. For the few deaths that do happen, evacuation speed is not always a factor. A recent casualty was a student who self-immolated.
Maybe it’s not the fires that are dangerous, but people? Conventional wisdom suggests that emergencies cause mass panic, leading to deadly stampedes. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Research reveals that in emergency situations, people tend to remain calm and help each other because the victims’ focus shifts from “me” to “us.” During 9/11, people walked down the stairs in single file and held the door open for each other. Crowds are more dangerous when the stakes are superficial, for instance, rushing into a Best Buy on Black Friday.
Fires are not a material risk, and neither are the crowds fleeing them. However, our attempt to solve this non-issue has significant financial and educational costs.
The U.K. has more school fires per capita, thanks to arsonists, and yet schools are required to have just one drill annually. Despite this, zero U.K. children died in nonresidential building fires last year. The mechanics of an evacuation just aren’t that complicated. You proceed to the nearest exit and walk down in a quick but orderly fashion. It doesn’t take eight drills. If New York State adopted the U.K. approach, it would save $234 million with no safety impact. Mandating eight fire drills a year is like requiring people to wear helmets on the sidewalk.
Everyone would like to be in a world where their neighbors and children feel empowered to handle an emergency, but this isn’t the emergency we should prepare for. According to the CDC, teens are 700 times more likely to die of an overdose than a school fire, yet most kids in my health class don’t know how to administer naloxone, do CPR, or treat alcohol poisoning.
Because we learn about safety through scary anecdotes rather than data, our fears have little to do with reality. Students should learn to ground their perception of risk in facts. The time we currently allocate to fire drills offers an opportunity for a Data-Driven Fatality Prevention Crash Course, or DDFPCC, for sort-of short. Niles Thompson died 116 years ago. There are real dangers to address; it’s time to move on from the pretend ones.
Kemble-Curry is a senior at Avenues school in Manhattan.
