Fire escapes are having a moment: an explainer on whatever happened to them reached a big tech forum's front page, and the Wikipedia article on fire escapes drew about three times its usual daily views on Oct 20, 2026 (Wikimedia pageviews). Clocks change on Oct 25 in Europe and Nov 1 in the US - the classic weekend to test smoke alarms.
Two ways out of every room. Will your plan hold at 2 a.m.?
Sketch your home: rooms, who sleeps where, doors, windows, alarms and a meeting spot outside. The page draws it as a cutaway and checks it for free. One run imagines the plan failing at night - and tells you how, with a fix for each and a practice drill for your household.
1 Rooms
Every room someone sleeps in, plus any other room you want on the cutaway. A door route counts if it leads through a hall or stairs to the outside.
2 Who sleeps where
Names stay in your browser unless you run the premortem or keep the plan. First names or initials are enough.
3 The rest of the plan
4 The cutaway
- Gets out alone
- Child
- Needs help
- Alarm inside
- Window exit
- Blocker
- Gap
Escape clock rough estimate
The page's findings
Every time
5 Run the premortem
The verdict follows a fixed rule: rework if the page found any blocker; patch if it found any gap; ready to drill otherwise. The premortem imagines the plan failing at night, ties every failure to a finding or to your notes, invents no room, lock or habit you did not mention, and never gives an emergency number - use your local one.
6 Take it with you
The fridge card and the files work without a run; a premortem, when there is one, is added to the Markdown and JSON.
7 Kept plans
How the page works it out
A room's ways out are a door route (through a hall or stairs to the outside) and a window you can climb out of at ground level (on the ground floor or from a basement) or with an escape ladder; an upper window without a ladder, a window marked ground level on an upper floor, a stuck or barred window and no window do not count. Blockers: a slept-in room with no way out, a person who needs help with nobody named to help (a helper who needs help too does not count), and no smoke alarm confirmed anywhere. Gaps: a slept-in room with one way out or no alarm inside, a window marked ground level on an upper floor, a ladder three floors up, a child nobody is named to wake, a helper marked as a child, a helper who sleeps on another floor, a person not matched to a room, no alarm confirmed on every level, alarms not tested this month, no meeting spot, and no practice drill in the last six months.
The escape clock is a rough rule of thumb, not a measurement: about 20 s to wake with an alarm in the room (45 s without), 20 s through a door plus 15 s per floor of stairs, 30 s out of a ground-level window, 60 s down a ladder, 30 s more for a child nobody wakes, 30 s more to help someone on the same floor (60 s from another floor), and 15 s to the meeting spot. Fire-safety guidance says a home fire can leave as little as two minutes to get out - so time a real drill and enter it.
The checks follow widely published home fire-safety advice (for example from the U.S. National Fire Protection Association and national fire services): two ways out of every room, a smoke alarm inside every bedroom, outside each sleeping area and on every level, testing alarms monthly, and practising your escape twice a year. This page is not a substitute for advice from your local fire service - many offer free home safety visits. If you live in a block of flats, follow the building's fire plan: some tell residents to stay in their flat unless fire or smoke reaches it.