Office Of The Fire Code Official: Fill & Download for Free

Finally I have a perfect place to write about my favorite weird US town! 😃 YAY!Centralia, PA - The Real Life Silent HillThe town that has literally been burning for over 50 years!The town’s population peaked in 1890 at 2,761, at which time, it boasted seven churches, five hotels, 27 saloons, two theaters, a bank, a post office, and 14 general and grocery stores. [1]Up till the 1930’s and 40’s Centralia was a bustling town with an active coal mining industry spurred on by the war efforts of WWII.The population started to dwindle in the 1950’s due to a decline in need for coal mining. In 1962, the population had shrunk to 1,300 people, and the city council suggested cleaning out the town’s landfill by lighting it on fire. (🔥)Unfortunately, the fire didn’t stop burning after all the trash was gone. Smoke and fires just kept popping up over the next few weeks, so the firefighters were sent in to figure out why.Again - unfortunately, the landfill was right on top of one of the town’s abandoned coal mines, and a trash fire of that magnitude provided a perfect pathway to light all that coal ablaze. At one point, they were pumping water directly into the mine, without success. The fire was now burning out of control, directly below the town of Centralia.After all efforts to quell the fire had failed, the town was simply out of money. The fire had been burning for 20 years straight before efforts were made to evacuate the town after a 12 year old boy fell into a burning sinkhole that suddenly opened in his backyard. (He survived - but imagine the nightmares he had afterward!)In 1983 the federal government allocated approx $42,000,000 to fund relocation efforts for the citizens of the town. By the year 1990, only 63 people remained.It wasn’t until 2002 that Centralia’s official ZIP code was formally dissolved, and until 2009 that the mayor gave a formal eviction. (50 years later!)As of 2010, only around 10 residents remain, and that number dwindles more and more with every passing year.(One of the few remaining houses with occupants. They redefine the word stubborn!)Centralia, PA was the inspiration for one of my all-time favorite video game franchises Silent Hill. While this is true, the few remaining residents of Centralia are not happy with the boost in tourism. [2]Although nothing supernatural is at work in Centralia, it is still my favorite weird, freaky, creepy American town.Footnotes[1] Centralia, Pennsylvania - A Lost Town[2] The "real" Silent Hill is sick of tourists | Boing Boing

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.We don’t have an exact timeline of the Orlando Nightclub Shootings yet.I can tell you that there is no way anyone from the club’s crowd could have incapacitated the shooter in the first moments of the attack; it doesn’t matter if anyone in the crowd was armed (which somebody was). A lot of the reasons this particular attack was the worst mass shooting in American history revolve around the venue; nightclubs are absurdly dangerous when anything goes wrong. I’ll qualify those opinions later.Source: (Former Orlando nightclub photographer: 'Tell people ... you love them”)First of all, I have some amount of background in building codes and inspection techniques. I’ve taken classes on everything except the International Plumbing Code.Those books aren’t cheap.While this may seem tangential to a mass shooting, a big part of commercial building codes across the world is fire prevention and building egress. The size, number, and location of building exits has to be carefully determined based on the building’s layout and maximum occupancy. This is because both fires and ensuing panic they cause are huge threats, especially in assembly occupancies like night clubs.We’re going to use the Station nightclub fire as an illustrative example of crowds panicking when attempting egress. The Station burned to the ground on February 20, 2003 because a band performing at the venue illegally used fireworks inside the building, igniting the stage’s sound insulation. Of the 462 people inside the club, 100 died and 230 were injured. It isn’t the worst nightclub fire in US history but what makes it notable is the fact that we have the entire thing on video. This made the incident of particular interest to fire investigators and building safety officials everywhere since we know exactly what happened from the very beginning.I urge discretion to viewers, this video is disturbing. Do not watch it if you believe you may be emotionally affected by it.Here’s a floor plan, take notice that there are actually a fair number of exits.Source: (The Station nightclub fire)These are the locations where the victims inside the building died.Source: (The Station nightclub fire)The first particularly interesting thing about the incident is that it took about 30 seconds for the band to realize something was wrong and stop playing. The band was literally feet away from the blaze. It took many in the crowd a bit longer than that to process the situation. But once everybody figured it out, there was a a rush for the exits. The most telling thing is the huge number of people who attempted to leave the way they came in. One or two people tripped and the crowd pushed over them, causing more people to trip and eventually blocking the entire exit with human bodies stacked on top of each other. It took less than two minutes for that to happen. The crowd pushing from the back to get away from the flames and smoke boxed in the people already inside the hallway, denying them the chance to find another way out.Visit the following National Fire Protection Association website if you want to learn more about nightclubs and other assembly occupancies. The page includes a case study of the Station fire and the NFPA’s response.The effects of the fire itself aren’t really relevant to a mass shooting inside a nightclub, but the crowd behavior a fire induces is. It has repeatedly been observed in all buildings, not just nightclubs, that in emergency situations between half and a third of the occupants will attempt to retrace their steps and exit the way they entered the building. The primary factor which mitigates this practice is if the source of danger is directly and observably blocking the occupant’s point of entry. If confronted with danger during egress, most occupants will flee with little regard for where their flight takes them. In nightclubs in particular, this is dangerous because of poor lighting, potential slip or trip hazards, and the dense crowds common to the occupancy type. Nightclubs are also very distracting environments which makes it more difficult for occupants to detect emergencies in the first place. All this makes nightclubs a perfect environment for human stampedes.But specifically about the Pulse Nightclub Shooting…This was the only decent floor plan I’ve been able to find so far. It’ll have to do.Source: (Three Hours of Horror: Inside the Orlando Nightclub Massacre)At this point in time the preliminary eyewitness accounts seem to indicate the shooter entered the club and opened fire somewhere on the main dance floor targeting the bar. One common thread between most of the eyewitness accounts and videos is that many patrons of the club didn’t realize anything was happening at first due to the club’s distracting environment. This is similar in many ways to what happened at Station. The crowd in Pulse was completely caught off guard. I’d guess the shooter probably expended his first magazine before the entire crowd realized what was happening. You can’t take the opportunity to incapacitate a shooter if you don’t know that a shooting is happening in the first place, so the opening moments of the attack are out of the running.Green “O”s represent patrons. The red “X” and associated markings represent the shooter.Once the crowd realizes there is shooting though, people panic. On top of the poor lighting, every fallen victim is a trip hazard for the fleeing survivors. This is another case where most of the crowd can not attempt to incapacitate the shooter simply due to crowd movement; if you’re in the middle of the crowd, you’re moving with it. The reason I suspect the shooter was more or less in the spot where I placed him is because much of the crowd fled to the patio. That would indicate the crowd didn’t have the option of retracing their steps for egress. Many patrons in other room on the left similarly heard gunfire from their entry point and fled to the bathrooms in panic. There may have been one or more stampedes.Somewhere around this point in time, an off duty police officer engages the shooter. A gunfight between the two breaks out. As far as we currently know, neither the shooter or the officer was injured, but the shooter did retreat to the bathrooms. It should be noted that the off duty police officer is at a significant disadvantage in the nightclub’s environment. The officer must be able to pick out the shooter in poor lighting among lots of other people present. By contrast, all the shooter has to do is fire at anything which is moving. I would estimate that roughly 60–80% of casualties had already been inflicted at this point.I’m having the blue police officer take cover behind the bar just for the sake of drawing. We have no real idea of where he actually was.Once the shooter retreated, I feel it is likely the officer decided not to pursue but instead hold the area so victims could be retrieved from the main dance floor with some measure of safety. At this point, any potential crowd involvement has ended. The victims hiding in the bathrooms are in no position to ambush the shooter.The reason this attack differs from something like the the 2011 Tucson shooting is due to the venue. In the Tucson shooting the crowd wasn’t confined to fleeing en masse through designated exits; they could disperse into the surrounding parking lot. Because of that, some crowd members were able to stay behind and engage the shooter after the first volley of gunfire.But with night clubs, the unfortunate truth is that if you don’t follow the crowd, you will be trampled. This has been observed time and time again in fires. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happened at Pulse.

At some point around June of 1947, ships navigating the Strait of Malacca picked up a distress message from the SS Ourang Medan, a Dutch merchant ship. The message, in Morse code, read:All Officers, including the Captain, are dead. Lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead…Then, following a flurry of unintelligible dots and dashes, came the final two words:I die. [1]Nothing more was ever heard…Though the exact year varies from source to source, the supposed tragedy of the SS Ourang Medan is said to have occurred sometime within the 1940s—1940, 1947 or 1948—though the majority of sources credit 1947 as the most likely date. [2]Rescuers—who boarded the ship following the chilling Morse code message—found the vessel exactly as described: every single one of the crew were dead. The ship was littered with corpses.The crew, however, wasn’t just dead—they were all dead in the exact same position. Every last one was found lying on their backs, frozen stiff, faces upturned in expressions of mock surprise, eyes wide with horror. Their arms were raised, almost as if they were attempting to fight off whatever it was that killed them.The victims all seemed to resemble horrific shop-window mannequins.^A deceased crew member of the Ourang Medan found in the ship’s boiler-room. [3]It is reported that the ship’s dog was discovered just the same: frozen stiff, paws raised and eyes wide with shock. Even the radio operator, thought to have sent out the doomed SOS message, was found frozen with fear.The rescuers also described that the deceased crew seemed to all be turned towards the sun. [4]Right as the Ourang Medan was set to be towed back to land, a fire broke out from the cargo-hold, forcing the rescuers to flee. A short time later, the ship exploded, conveniently destroying any opportunity of further investigation.So what actually happened to the Ourang Medan?Those who believe in the existence of the ship to begin with, have often put forth the theory of poisoning and asphyxiation.Among these theories, it is supposed that sea water might have entered the ship, reacting with an unknown cargo to release a toxic gas. Gas that would later ignite, hence the bizarre explosion. [5]Another theory suggests that the ship was transporting nerve agents from China (where the Japanese had stored them during the war) to the United States, explaining both the mysterious circumstances of the ship’s destruction, and the reason that it has never been mentioned on official documents. With this theory, it is thought that the U.S. government attempted to hide the tragedy of the Ourang Medan, smothering it with the facade of folklore.Whether fact or fiction, the mystery of the Ourang Medan is truly a chilling tale.Footnotes[1] Story of "S.S. Ourang Medan" The Mystery Ship ⋆ Mysterious Facts[2] Ourang Medan - Wikipedia[3] The strange case of the Ourang Medan ghost ship[4] Mystery Of The Ourang Medan - The Ship Of Horror | MessageToEagle.com[5] Tragedy on the S.S. Ourang Medan - Fact or Legend? | Historic Mysteries