Back when I was in school we had fire drills and it was clear that he schools were designed for rapid exit and general fire safety. The idea of practice before a fire and designing schools to be safe sounded like a good idea. There are lots of good ideas out there. What happened to trigger a translation those nominally good ideas into rules, architectural designs and behavioral changes like a fire drills?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012875.html

Another good idea was the thought of adding a smell to common flammable gasses. What happened to make that come about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion

Building codes, fire safety, most of the common safety laws and rules are, as they say, written in blood. People died and were maimed before anyone took the seemingly common sense good ideas seriously enough to make them shift from good ideas into laws, codes, behavior.

The problem is that humans have short memories and the burning issues of 1908 seem distant and improbable in 1958. So we forget get lax, sloppy, and we get:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Angels_School_Fire

Forgetting has a very high price.


This post was inspired by and contains themes from:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/why_do_we_have_fire_drills.php