Checked-in, past security, latte in hand and chatting pleasantly with the lovely Japanese lady sitting eating raw carrot and celery at 8.45 in the morning, our London City idyll of air transport (they say 'good morning' and 'certainly madam you may carry your passport, boarding papers, purse, and Kindle in that flat leather bag - no need to crush it into your carry-on Prada) suddenly collapsed.
I got up to look if the Florence flight (thank you City Unslicker for highlighting the service) was going to the gate yet , caught a whiff of plastic-laden fumes, and the civilised airport erupted into sirens, orders (in English, French and German I noticed even as I tried to get my eye on the nearest exit - the rest of the EU knows its place now when it gets down to the bottom line of evacuating an airport) and stampeded.
Oh, there were lots of emergency exits - but they wouldn't open, not towards the aircraft side. The only routes out were back: back to the non-checked-in, non security-guaranteed-by-all-manner-of-airport-measures, London bus stops, and taxi ranks, and DLR, and ordinary life. What's the point of all that palaver - chaps holding up their beltless trousers over stockinged-feet, carefully packed bags roughly pulled apart so that the Waitrose ginger cake arrives all squashed, 'wands' being poked at parts of the plumper ladies, silk scarves arriving through the supposed x-ray machine with threads pulled by whatever vicious scanning creatures they keep in those tunnels for precious possessions dumped in plastic trays? We were herded back and forth across the airport concourse from one locked 'security' exit 'door' to another, which is not funny in the company of a majority of alpha males determined to save themselves and whatever business deal they were travelling for.
Then the whole lot of us - alpha males included - had to go through security again to a background of furious muttering from the staff that they'd done us once and why couldn't we have been herded outside airside? The one saving grace of all this is that there were no young children, and buggies, and mothers who eat alpha-males alive when it comes to a building evacuation. When will the lessons be learned that when it comes to evacuating a building in a fire all exits must be open? This time it was only a small fire quickly dealt with. It isn't always like that, and we didn't panic under the smoke and the confusion. But now I wonder that I took it all so meekly. Why couldn't we open those doors?
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2 comments:
Are you saying that actual marked Fire Exits were locked and unopenable?
These days that would cause the building to be illegal and uncertified, and the London Fire Brigade would certainly require it to be closed to the public.
I can only assume that these were not actually Fire Exits, but simply doors that happened to look useful as a way out?
They had round green labels with a symbol of a running man and were marked as exits. I couldn't get near enough to see what those pushing on them were doing to try and open them but they were making gestures to indicate that they couldn't get them open.
A large section of the crowd in the airport lounge (which was very full because fog had delayed many flights) was turned right round on itself from the direction it had taken towards indicated exit doors and sent back towards our section of the crowd which was queueing to go out the way we had come in, past the security channels. After some minutes (many were still in the lounge waiting to get out) the doors that I could see people nearest had been unable to open were opened (I think by security, there were staff standing beside them by then).
We were an adult, able-bodied crowd, Yacht, carrying nothing but hand bags yet it took us three surge attempts to find an exit route. We were not free-range escapees leaving by all available doors but marshalled (eventually) out.
Not good, in retrospect. I really must stop waiting about politely to see if earthquakes or fire alarms are serious or not.
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