Advice

When the heat is on

Do you have a plan?

Being awakened in a hotel in the middle of the night by the sound of a fire alarm is nothing new—certainly nothing new to me. Over the years, I’ve evacuated a dozen hotels in three countries in response to fire alarms. Sure, most of the alarms turned out to be false, but six—six!—were the real deal: Lights, sirens, fire trucks, firefighters, smoke and flames! There were no casualties in the fires I escaped, but people did die in other hotel fires during those years.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, the number of what it calls “civilian” deaths from hotel fires has been dropping over the years, but there are still about two dozen people killed each year in hotel and motel fires in the U.S. It is not unusual to read of hotel or motel guests who were killed or injured when they were caught in a fire.

Since most hotel and motel fires are survivable, why are people still dying? The answer to this question is part technology, part psychology. Thomas Olshanski, spokesperson for the United States Fire Administration (USFA), points to the importance of technology. “Sprinklers and smoke detectors are the two most important technologies to protect yourself from fire,” says Olshanski. So important in fact that the staff of the USFA will not stay in a hotel or motel that does not have fire suppression sprinklers in the guest rooms. (And neither should you.)

The other part of the survivability equation is psychology. This is where you must get involved in your own safety. The more you understand about how you and others are likely to respond in an emergency, the better your chance of coming out of it safe and sound.

An emergency is an infrequent, unpredictable event that requires an immediate response to avoid further disaster. Unfortunately it is precisely these characteristics of infrequency and unpredictability that contribute to the confusion that unprepared people demonstrate in an emergency. Without having given it some forethought, people simply don’t know what to do. Consequently they make mistakes—often with fatal results.

Even worse unprepared guests may take their cues on how to behave in an emergency from people who are as clueless as they. Indeed, psychologists have found that in emergency situations it is common to find that only about a quarter of the people affected take appropriate action. What do the rest do? Interestingly, they are unlikely to become hysterical. Instead they simply do nothing. They freeze.

They freeze because they don’t have a plan. And they don’t have a plan because they believe, as do most people, that tragedies happen to others, not to them. This is a very human—and very perilous—characteristic.

But disasters play no favorites. Every one of us travelers is likely to be caught in an emergency where we must act to save ourselves. As a veteran hotel-fire survivor, I have a plan. Do you?

Can you survive a hotel fire? Most hotels and motels have general fire survival information available in their guest rooms and have evacuation routes posted near doorways. But to survive a fire you need more than a few tips and directions to an exit. You need a plan.

Information to help make a fire survivability plan is available from the USFA and other emergency planning agencies and companies. But keep in mind that your plan should have three elements: Simplicity, action, and relevance.

Make it simple. Any elaborate scheme of survival will be difficult to recall and hard to implement.
Make it active. Immediate action is required in an emergency. If you wait to see what others do, you and they may well end up victims instead of survivors.
Make it relevant. Before getting comfortable in your room, review your survival plan and adapt it to your current situation.

Related Err Travel columns

Check-in check list -- Before I get settled, I check fire safety and plan my escape
Don't get burned -- How to survive a hotel fire
Fire! Fire! Fire! -- Forget about "evacuation management"
Hot hotels -- They asked about fire sprinklers, not lawn sprinklers
Six must-carry travel items -- (Okay, maybe seven)

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