Two Detectors at 6:52 a.m.
Hotel Azalea Yokohama has nine floors and 168 rooms. It is 6:52 a.m. in mid-July. The fire panel shows a detector alarm in room 412 and, forty seconds later, the fourth-floor corridor smoke detector. The first-floor breakfast buffet is serving about seventy guests. Three staff are on duty: one is on the telephone with a guest, one is at the cashier, one is restocking. Room 412 was occupied by a single guest who checked in at 1:20 a.m. A wheelchair user, Mr. Chen, is registered in room 902 with his wife. The second-floor women's communal bath has five guests inside and no attendant. The manual states: confirm within two minutes, make an announcement, call 119, evacuate via the stairs, never use the lifts. The assembly point is the car park behind the building.
1. Sequence the first three minutes. Should the 119 call wait for confirmation?
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Treat it as a fire until proven otherwise, and run confirmation and notification in parallel rather than in series. Minute one: one staff member takes the master key, a torch and an extinguisher to 412 and checks the door with the back of the hand before opening it; the cashier calls 119 - a call made on reasonable suspicion is not penalised, while a delayed call on a real fire is not recoverable. The third staffer makes the announcement: calm, scripted, 「there may be a fire, please leave by the stairs」, in Japanese and English, and begins moving people.
Confirmation shapes what you say next; it must not gate the call. If 412 proves clear but the corridor detector has also activated, the fire is probably outside the room, which strengthens rather than weakens the assumption of a real incident. Report back to the panel, then hand the panel status and the master key to the fire service on arrival.
2. How should the bath and the wheelchair guest be handled?
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Bath: send a staff member of the same sex in with a towel, call from the entrance, ask the five guests to dress and leave by the stairs; if only male staff are available, call from the doorway and hand in towels and robes rather than entering. The bath must not be left unattended once evacuation has begun, and someone must physically check it, because bathers cannot hear a corridor announcement over running water.
Wheelchair: 902 is not the fire floor, so the first answer is to keep Mr. Chen in place with the door closed. A nine-floor carry down a stairwell is slower and more dangerous than staying put until the fire service directs otherwise, and stairwells become congested with descending guests. Prepare instead: call 902 to tell him what is happening, assign two staff, identify an evacuation chair or blanket-carry method and a route, and move him horizontally to the far wing first if smoke reaches the upper floors. Lifts remain out of use throughout.
3. What should be done about the breakfast guests and the guest count?
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Stop the buffet: turn off the equipment and stop guests returning for food without creating a crush. Direct them out through the ground-floor exits to the car park, and keep a staff member at the lift lobby to turn people back, because in a hotel fire the lift lobby is where guests instinctively go. The staff member on the telephone must be told to hang up and leave.
At the assembly point, count by the room register, not by eye: read the guest list and tick arrivals. 「About seventy」 tells you nothing and cannot be handed to a fire officer. The count produces a list of unaccounted rooms, which is the single most useful thing you can give the fire service, along with the panel status and the master key. Do not re-enter the building to check a room yourself.