A horrifying story is in the news, about firefighters running up 23 flights of stairs to save people’s lives and then losing their own because of a building’s non-compliance with water requirements

The building housed the departments of health, human settlements and cooperative governance and traditional affairs for Gauteng, South Africa’s wealthiest province – home to Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria.

A government report that has surfaced in the last few days revealed that the building was only 21% compliant with occupational health and safety standards, as opposed to the expected norm of 85%.

80% non-compliance. Compliance is another way of saying a codified language exists for measuring disaster preparedness, and lack of compliance is a likelihood measure of disaster. For example America’s oldest professional safety organization, the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), was founded very purposefully six months after the Triangle fire.

When I hear people say they work on safety or security and do not know compliance, or choose to not focus on it, it seems like an engineer saying they do not believe in a code of ethics or taking an engineers’ creed:

To give the utmost of performance;
To participate in none but honest enterprise;
To live and work according to the laws of man and the highest standards of professional conduct;
To place service before profit, the honor and standing of the profession before personal advantage, and the public welfare above all other considerations

Investigations into a building’s woeful non-compliance will be the start, explaining how operations allowed people into a 21% facility and who is accountable, which should lead to a broader question of why only 85% is expected and whether that’s safe.