Post by Burnham Nationwide, Inc.

Six people died in a stairwell on the 12th floor of a Chicago high-rise in 2003. The building was only partially sprinklered. The floor where the fire started had no sprinklers at all. That fire became the origin story for Chicago's Life Safety Evaluation, and eventually for the Performance Compliance Method that architects and building owners use today when older buildings undergo substantial alterations. Christopher Chwedyk's latest blog traces that history and breaks down how the scoring process works, including why the original evaluation document is one of the most critical pieces of data a building can have on file. https://hubs.li/Q04lD8s-0