“Escape Rooms” are businesses where a group of friends or co-workers pay a fee to be locked in a room or set of rooms, find clues, and solve puzzles cooperatively to escape. Escape rooms have become popular as an affordable, fun, and challenging group activity. A tragedy in Poland involved such an escape room and resulted in the deaths of five teenagers due to a fire in January 2019. In response, thousands of escape rooms in Poland will now undergo fire safety inspections. Firefighters said that more than 100 escape rooms they inspected were considered unsafe, and several were closed immediately.
Escape rooms are no exception and must provide emergency egress and exits in accordance with the Building. Recommended ways to ensure Code compliance might include providing a secondary emergency-only exit that is not part of the game or using alarms instead of locks on exit doors that are part of the game. Providing manual stations for fire alarm activation in the game room and installing fail-safe electromagnetic locks connected to the fire alarm could be another option.
Before you and your escape room group become trapped inside to play a game, take a moment to discuss the emergency exit procedure. Any escape room game that requires an operator to unlock a door needed for an emergency exit is dangerous and strictly against the Fire Code.