Nearly a year after six people died in a high-rise building fire in downtown Chicago, the fire department has begun a new Life Safety Program for Commercial High-Rise Buildings designed to prevent a repeat of the tragedy. Failure to prepare occupants of high-rises was one of the factors cited as a cause of the deaths in an extensive report on the fire released by James Lee Witt Associates two weeks earlier.

Chicago Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter introduced the Chicago Fire Department's new program at a luncheon for nearly 300 members of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago (BOMA/Chicago) on Oct. 12. The program focuses on educating high-rise occupants on safety guidelines in case of a fire emergency.

The program is one of many reforms and initiatives Trotter has announced in the wake of the tragic high-rise fire last year. Six people died in a fire in the Cook County Administrative Building on Oct. 17, 2003. Their bodies and seven survivors were found locked in a stairwell 90 minutes after the response.

"We have a golden opportunity here -- an opportunity to ensure that Chicago is the safest commercial high-rise city in the country," Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter said. "While we all know that high-rise buildings are among the safest structures built, the issue of safety is all about familiarity and knowing what to do in case an emergency arises."

The Commissioner described the Life Safety Program for Commercial High-Rise Buildings as a citywide, consistent safety education message targeting high-rise building occupants. The program consists of a new strategic approach and a newly crafted safety message communicated by an expanded team of public education trainers.

The new Life Safety program has a team of five trainers charged with conducting seminars and fire drills. The new strategy will be dispersed throughout the city's downtown commercial high-rise area into quadrants with one trainer designated per quadrant, enabling them to reach more than 450 buildings in 2005, more than a 400% increase in past outreach levels.

To ensure every building has one consistent message, the Chicago Fire Department developed an acronym centered on the word CALM (CALL, ALERT, LISTEN and MOVE -- C-call 911, A-alert building management and security, L-listen for instructions and M-move to a safe area or evacuate if necessary).

The consistent message used in the seminar presentations is also part a new High-Rise Fire Safety DVD the department has created providing to high-rise building managers.  The DVD can be downloaded onto a company's Web page or downloaded from the fire department’s Web page

(www.cityofchicago.org/fire) and download the DVD.
The Fire Commissioner encouraged BOMA members to partner with the Fire Department, "I hope that each of you will invite us into your buildings, so that we may begin to educate all tenants and employees on Commercial High-Rise Life Safety."