Background

High-rise fires and rescue

Why fires above the reach of ladders are so hard to escape and fight: a summary of two pages kept with Rick Denzien’s Exit Traveler files.

Background reading, not safety advice. This page summarizes, in our own words, two web pages that Rick Denzien kept with his Exit Traveler files. The figures are the authors’ own, as published; this site has not checked them. For fire safety, follow your local fire department’s guidance.

Why this belongs in the archive

The Exit Traveler was sold as a way for one person on an upper floor to lower themselves to the ground when the normal exits were blocked by fire or smoke (Newsweek, October 26, 1987; see The Device). Its promotional text opened with a guest trapped in a high-rise hotel fire (Manila Standard, November 27, 1988). The two pages summarized here look at the same problem from two other directions: what firefighters can and cannot do once a fire is above the reach of their ladders, and how a helicopter might take people off a roof.

1. The firefighter’s view: why high-rise fires are so hard to fight

Based on Vincent Dunn’s 1995 Fire Engineering article. Dunn was then a deputy chief in the New York City Fire Department. The iklimnet.com page Rick saved reprints the same text.

Above the ladders, the options shrink. Dunn defines a high-rise in practical terms: any building taller than the fire department’s highest ladder. Above that height, firefighters cannot rescue people from the outside with ladders, and they cannot attack the fire with outside hose streams. Everything has to be done from the inside stairways.
Big open floors. He argues that one hose line can put out only a small part of a large open-plan office floor that is fully on fire. In such fires crews often hold the stairway while the contents burn out. He calls this “controlled burning.” He estimates that keeping a fire to one floor takes 40 to 50 firefighters in a fast, coordinated attack, and says that buildings in places without that many firefighters need automatic sprinklers.
Time to reach the fire. Getting from the alarm to water on the fire can take 15 minutes or more. Crews have to find the fire floor, use elevators under special controls, connect to standpipes and search large floors filled with smoke.
Building systems can fail. Dunn cites an eight-year New York City study in which elevators failed at 59 of 179 major fires. He also points to standpipe and water-pressure problems at the First Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles and the One Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia. He adds that tests at the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building found fire department radios working only up to the 65th floor.
Sealed buildings move smoke. Windows that do not open, the “stack effect” and shared air-conditioning systems can carry heat and smoke across many floors. He gives the example of a Las Vegas hotel fire in which, he writes, smoke spread through the air system and 85 people died.
“Defend in place” does not always hold. The usual plan is to fight the fire while most occupants stay put. Dunn notes that people leave anyway. He says 50,000 people left the World Trade Center towers after the 1993 bombing. He quotes the fire department’s post-fire analysis: “the ‘defend-in-place’ strategy does not exist.”

Dunn concludes that, in his opinion, the only real fire protection for a high-rise is automatic sprinklers combined with a system to remove the smoke.

2. The view from above: helicopter rescue from the roof

Based on the Precision Lift, Inc. page about its Heli-Basket. This is a manufacturer’s product page, so its claims are the company’s own.

The scale of the problem, as the page states it. It reports 13,000 fires in U.S. high-rise buildings in 1995, citing a report by Jim Arnold. It lists well-known skyscraper fires, including the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas, for which it gives 86 deaths and more than 600 injuries. (Dunn’s figure for the Las Vegas hotel fire is 85; each figure is given here as its source published it.)
Roofs are crowded. Many older towers have antennas, signs and air-conditioning equipment on the roof, so a helicopter cannot land there.
The usual method is slow. Normally rescuers rope down to the roof and people are winched up one at a time. The page adds that a burning tower can act like a chimney, which makes the roof a risky place to wait.
The product. The Heli-Basket is a basket that hangs below a helicopter and can be set down on a cluttered roof. The company lists three sizes: HB2000 (up to 16 people), HB3000 (26) and HB5000 (more than 34). Placing it requires a pilot trained in “vertical reference” flying.
How a roof rescue would work. The basket first carries firefighters and medical crews to the roof. They can cut away obstructions with power saws, checking first that the roof can take the extra load. Some go into the building wearing breathing apparatus. The team keeps order among the people waiting and guides the pilot. The page warns that rescue from windows or balconies is “extremely dangerous” and not a recommended use. It also notes that aviation rules and procedures apply.

What the two pages have in common

Both pages describe the same gap. Once people are above ladder height, ladders and outside hose streams can no longer reach them. Help then has to come from inside the stairways or, according to the Heli-Basket page, from the roof, and it does not cover windows and balconies. Neither page mentions the Exit Traveler. The Exit Traveler was marketed for the person at that window, with models for buildings of four, seven and 12 stories (Newsweek, October 26, 1987).

Sources

All links were checked on October 27, 2026. The live iklimnet.com and vincentdunn.com pages are online. The original Fire Engineering page is also online, but it blocks some automated checks, so a Wayback copy is linked as well. Precision Lift’s site is offline, so the Internet Archive copy is linked.

Vincent Dunn, “Why Can’t the Fire Service Extinguish Fires in High-Rise Buildings?” Fire Engineering, December 1, 1995. Read it · Wayback copy
Vincent Dunn, “High Rise Fires,” vincentdunn.com (the same text, as a training page). Read it
“High Rise Fires,” iklimnet.com, the page saved by Rick Denzien (it reproduces Dunn’s article without a byline). Read it · Wayback copy, July 2003
Precision Lift, Inc., “Helicopter Rescue From High-Rise Buildings With the Heli-Basket,” precision.rotor.com (a manufacturer’s product page; the site is no longer online). Read it