Former firefighter cautions we should be skeptical of the safety of this plan, and your rebuttal is "surely building codes mandate..."? A zero-evidence rebuttal concerning the safety of 4500 students.
I don’t find it unreasonable to assume that the building will comply with government fire safety regulations and that those regulations are at least somewhat adequate.
You might be surprised. Fire regulations are very much a local issue and there can be a lot of variance (although many local municipalities base their codes on standards put out by bodies like the NFPA, etc.).
There are quite frequently things that one might intuitively expect to be in the regs, that aren't. Requirements for sprinklers, for example. As surprising as it may seem, there are still lots of places where sprinklers are not required in many buildings.
I don't know the situation in Santa Barbara, but I did email their fire department earlier with an inquiry about this topic. Hoping to hear something back.
I don't find it unreasonable to think that government regulations around fire safety are based on current building trends. Nobody in the US stuffs 4500 people into a single building with almost all of them in the interior of the building. Nobody would voluntarily live that way, even the "projects" were/are more humane.
Just looking at the proposed floorplan, in an emergency it would be a nightmare to get out. 7 kids trying to get out that one door with a giant table in the way while likely panicking? It screams deathtrap.
You know who was violating fire regulations for decades? Nuclear Power plants! You would things that's the one place where safety would be taken seriously, right?
If you were an architect who was concerned enough with the design to quit, wouldn't you both know about and publicize potential (or real) safety concerns?
