Room Escape Artist

Earth. Fire. Air. Water. Each of these elements presents challenges so unique that under most conditions, most escape room creators should never use any of them at all.

Today we’re going to explore fire, which is so dangerous that every community on Earth has developed dedicated methods of managing fire and fire risk. This is because fire is both an individual and a communal threat.

We’re going to cover a wide variety of basic topics because fire and fire safety is tragically misunderstood.

Fires Used To Be A Very Big Problem

Fire used to kill an unfathomable number of people. Only in 1903 did we collectively start to do something about the incredible death toll. The key turning point was the Iroquois Theater fire which killed hundreds of people because theaters were not managing fire safety of their own volition.

Another key moment in fire safety history was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire which was an utter disaster specifically because the factory owner locked their employees in with no means of escape.

The 1984 Haunted Castle fire at Six Flags Great Adventure was a massive turning point for both haunted houses and theme parks. The fuel for this fire was theatrical foam that had not been properly treated to make it fire retardant.

The current fire codes for escape rooms are heavily influenced by the 2019 Poland escape room fire.

The fact of the matter is that fire code regulations are written in blood. The people who write and revise fire code look at what failed and attempt to use that code to prevent the problem in the future.

If you’re interested in understanding more about fire code and hardware join us at this year’s RECON. We have egress hardware expert Lori Greene delivering an essential talk on the subject.

What Is It Like Inside A Fire?

Movies, TV, books, and video games generally do a poor job of helping people understand what it’s actually like inside of a burning structure. Depictions of heroic people rushing into a raging fire with nothing to protect them aside from the shirt that they have pulled over their mouth are unrealistic.

Fire consumes everything including the air around you. While many know that door handles will become scorching hot, far fewer realize that fires do strange things to the air pressure in a building. Fires can suck and hold doors closed or slam them open with powerful force.

The heat is unbearable and as it heats up the objects around you, everything you touch has the opportunity to deliver life-threatening burns.

As a fire burns it off-gases noxious fumes from everything that is set ablaze. If you look around your home or an escape room, everything has a unique chemical composition that will break down in the inferno, releasing mixtures of gases that the human body was never meant to inhale. Your eyes will blur and sting; you’ll barely be able to see. The thing that most people don’t realize about fire is that if you’re going to die in one, it’s rarely the flames that do you in. It’s the smoke. There are so many different things that will render you unconscious with very few breaths. And even if you survive, the smoke inhalation could still leave you with a terminal medical condition.

Fire consumes and destroys mindlessly and violently.

What Is Fire?

Fire is the visible effect of combustion caused by a combination of 3 things:

• Oxygen – the air that’s almost certainly present if people are
• Fuel – something that can burn like wood, plastics, gasoline, propane, butane, etc.
• Heat – a flame, a spark, or anything that can push the fuel past its flashpoint

This is referred to as the fire triangle, and once a fire starts, it will continue to burn so long as there is oxygen, fuel, and heat. The hotter a fire gets, the more likely that any given material within a structure will hit its flashpoint. As that happens, more things become fuel for the fire, and more noxious chemicals will release as smoke.

This is why when sculpted foam is used in an escape room, it needs a fire retardant coat. If you see foam in an escape room and it’s super soft and fragile, there’s a good chance that it has not been properly treated.

Theatrical Uses Of Fire In An Escape Room

It doesn’t happen often, especially in North America, but fire does show up in escape rooms. Here are a few uses that I have encountered (in increasing order of risk):

Flash Paper

Flash Paper is chemically treated paper that will quickly flash and burn off in a burst of light. It doesn’t give off much heat, it doesn’t have much fuel, and it burns off exceptionally fast. Theatrically, this is your best option for adding fire into an escape room.

That said, you still need to make sure that you have truly controlled the environment, eliminating possible fuel sources… and you must store the extra flash paper safely (Flash Paper safety).

Candles

The most common form of fire is probably the simplest: candles. Way back in Season 3 of Reality Escape Pod, Chris Waters talked about how never using real candles was a big rule for him. While candles aren’t the most dangerous objects on Earth, they are still a persistent flame, surrounded by oxygen, and almost certainly surrounded by fuel. They are a very bad idea, especially if you haven’t removed fuel sources from around them, and don’t have a plan in place that you have practiced to put them out swiftly.

Blowtorches

Believe it or not, I have seen blowtorches in escape rooms. Twice.

This is extraordinarily stupid because if we refer back to our fire triangle, escape rooms always have oxygen… so a blowtorch is bringing in both a powerful source of fuel and an exceptionally hot heat source.

In the cases that I encountered, propane torches were used, which is an extra terrible idea in an enclosed space without good ventilation.

And this is made worse by the likelihood that any escape room that’s using a damn blowtorch for theatrics is almost certainly storing extra fuel on-premises. I’d also be willing to bet that most of the creators who are willing to use blowtorches in their games are not regularly inspecting the equipment for leaks and haven’t installed carbon monoxide detectors in the relevant places.

Intentionally Lighting A Player On Fire

I’m not going to tell this story here because it’s coming up in a review later this week, but get ready for the most negative review that has ever been published on Room Escape Artist.

What Are The Dangers?

Fire is always a threat to a building, and even a small fire can do terrible things.

In an escape room, bringing an open flame into a game, especially a powerful one, is an unnecessary risk.

When people die in a fire, it’s because of multiple failures. Sure, it’s possible that the only risky decision that an escape room owner has made when building their game was that they gave an actor a blowtorch… but let’s be real here, any designer putting a blowtorch into the hands of a performer is likely making other bad decisions. For example, this is someone who has a teenage performer menacing their players with a blowtorch while the players are locked up without a means of egress.

I love escape rooms, but I have no desire to die in one.

Fire Week

This is the beginning of what we are not-so-affectionately referring to as Fire Week here at Room Escape Artist.

Over the next few days, you’re going to see a writeup about a fire in a Russian escape room with fatalities, an Open Letter to the Escape Room Owners of Athens, Greece, and finally reviews for 4 different games that are using fire in escape rooms. In my opinion, all of these games are using fire in obviously hazardous ways, but some are more dramatic than others.

We’re going to piss some people off this week, but my hope is that we drive understanding this week.

All of these pieces have taken an incredibly long time to write because I’ve had to do a lot of extra homework in an attempt to write about fire safety with some degree of competence. I’ll be real with you: I have not enjoyed this. I didn’t get into writing about escape rooms to battle with escape room creators about the fundamentals of safety. However, it’s become very clear to me that this is the most important thing that I can be doing right now.

With that in mind, I want to say thank you to our Patreon supporters who have been very understanding of my absence from chat as I have worked on this content as well as producing this year’s RECON. The amount of time that I have spent on this stuff doesn’t make any financial sense. It’s just important… and I could not do it without the financial and moral support of the community.

Thank you!

Thank you to our Patreon backers for your support.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Dan Necid, Ben Johnson, Olivia, Sarah Ezolt, Tobias Döring, Connor Turley, Christopher Gaines, and John Hergenroeder

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

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