Safety experts said a lack of sprinklers above the ground floor, doors to stairwells that automatically locked and hindered fleeing workers, and confusion among the workers all contributed to the loss of life.
Despite regular fire drills, survivors of the Friday evening blaze in a supply room of the Cook County administration building said an evacuation order led to chaos. Had workers stayed where they were, they might not have died. There was no agreement who issued the order.
``There were so many things that went wrong here,'' Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy said Monday.
``It was a very small fire. It was a contained fire,'' he added. ``No one should have died.''
While Murphy demanded an independent investigation, city officials stressed that they were probing what went wrong and intended to provide answers.
Fire Commissioner James Joyce, who said his department did not order the evacuation, maintained that workers would have been safer had they stayed in their offices.
A spokeswoman for 69 West Washington Management _ comprising the building's two private managers _ said the company does not know who ordered the evacuation.
Soon after the fire was discovered on the 12th floor, workers were told to leave the 35-story building. But some workers met firefighters in the stairwell who ordered them back upstairs _ where they found that stairwell doors had locked automatically.
The victims died while searching for an unlocked door from the smoky stairwell.
``I think it's a wake-up call,'' said Jim O'Neil of Northeast Security, who oversees fire safety for about 15 high-rise buildings in the Boston area. ``What I'm seeing here is general confusion.''
Besides the lack of sprinklers and the stairwell doors that automatically locked, safety experts pointed to the lack of pressurized stairwells, which are designed to keep smoke from entering.
``Buildings have to have very defined fire evacuation plans,'' said Howard Safir, former New York City fire commissioner and now head of a security consulting firm. ``Then they have to have the technology that goes along with it, like pressurized stairwells, like smart locks that don't lock people in stairwells.''
The building was not required to have sprinklers above the ground floor because it was built before the city code required them.
Safir said there has never been a high-rise fire in a New York City building with sprinklers that was not put out by them. But, he said, proper training of high-rise residents is probably the most important factor in saving lives.
Some people who were inside the building during the fire said that despite regular fire drills, there was confusion during the evacuation. Murphy also said workers were told during the drills that the stairwells would be safe.
Murphy called for an independent investigation, saying city and county officials had already made up their minds that the situation had been handled properly.
``People want answers,'' Chicago Mayor Richard Daley acknowledged.
Joyce said the fire department's investigation was continuing.
``There's a lot of questions to be answered. That process is in the works now,'' he said.
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