Hospitals don't burn

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Movie
German title Hospitals don't burn
Original title Hospitals don't burn down
Country of production Australia
original language English
Publishing year 1977
length 24 minutes
Rod
Director Brian Trenchard-Smith
script Anne Brooksbank
Chris McGill

Hospitals burn not , English original title down burn Hospitals do not , is a training film about fire safety .

The film was produced in 1977 by Film Australia in Australia and is distributed by Pyramid Media, based in Santa Monica , California ( USA ). The length is 24 minutes. A version with German dubbing is available from relevant institutions such as the Academy for Crisis Management, Emergency Planning and Civil Protection (AKNZ) and the specialist information center of the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Aid (BBK). The aim of the film is to train and sensitize hospital staff, particularly with regard to preventive fire protection and the correct response in an emergency. However, it is also used in the training of emergency services in the field of fire brigades and disaster control in order to clarify the psychological aspects of a disaster situation .

Story of the movie

In partly dramatic and very realistic scenes, the film shows how a chain of negligence , carelessness, insufficient preparation and training, carelessness, ignorance, wrong decisions and panic reactions can develop from a comparatively harmless smoldering fire into a major fire in a multi-storey hospital.

At the beginning of the film you see a patient named Hilton who is found smoking under the covers by a nurse in the evening. She tells him to put out the cigarette. A little later you see Hilton again smoking in the hallway. When he is afraid of being caught again, he throws the burning cigarette into a shaft that is used to transport the laundry to the laundry in the basement. The cigarette falls on newspaper at the end of the shaft. The fire starts at around 10:35 p.m.

After the newspaper begins to burn slowly, the fire spreads to nearby laundry and other highly flammable material. At 1:45 a.m., the fire alarm triggers the alarm and the fire brigade is alerted. At this point it is still a comparatively harmless fire. A minute later, a student nurse discovers smoke coming out of the laundry chute and opens it. As a result, air reaches the previously smoldering fire, which suddenly increases in intensity. The flames come out of the opening of the laundry chute, the student nurse is killed. The fire then spreads rapidly on the eighth and ninth floors of the hospital and in the basement.

In the further course there are further fatalities from smoke inhalation as well as wrong decisions in the evacuation of the clinic. The fire spreads to the stairwell and the other floors, favored by improper storage of easily flammable materials anyway insufficiently available or difficult to access fire protection equipment such as fire extinguishers . Emergency exits are partially blocked or blocked and therefore inaccessible. Due to the chaotic circumstances, the fire brigade is largely unable to bring the fire under control or to rescue the patients and staff in a coordinated manner.

At 2:16 a.m., 31 minutes after the fire alarm, around 100 firefighters from twelve fire departments are on duty. A background commentator at the end of the film tells viewers that the fire will burn for another six hours. It ends in a catastrophe with nine deaths and a completely burned-out building, refuting the belief expressed in the title of the film that hospitals cannot burn down.

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