FIRE!

[cougie uk]

I was on a fire warden training course once. We went to a fire station to do the training. Classroom was at the back of the building - a few corridors to get to it. They were telling us that they've run fire drills a few times as soon as pupils have arrived.
Most of them retrace their steps to go out the way they came in - it's human nature. They ignore the fact there is a fire exit in the classroom.

See the Bradford City fire too - people went back to the turnstiles rather than step onto the pitch.

 

[presta]

The most labyrinthine maze of a building I've ever stayed in was Cheltenham YMCA, a map of the corridors must have looked like a plate of spaghetti. It took half the evening to get the hang of finding my way to and from my room without getting lost, then at 9pm they locked some of the doors in the corridors and I had to start again. Not much prospect of getting out of there in a fire.
After passing the reception desk several times in succession:
"Can I help"
"I've seen an OS map on the wall somewhere, and now I can't find it"
"Nah, there aren't aren't maps"
So I kept looking, and eventually found it in a dead-end corridor down in the basement.

I've had several fire alarms in hostels over the years: Bath, Eskdale, Rowen, Broadhaven.
They had to get the brigade out at Bath, because the faulty detector was up in the loft. The one at Rowen I set off, I switched a grill on in the members kitchen, and there was a load of old fat coating it which promptly burnt off with much smoke.

This conformity experiment makes interesting watching. The alarm at Broadhaven was at 5am, and the other guy in my dorm was either a heavy sleeper or ignoring it, so I had to chivvy him to get him to move.