Is it true that nine -story buildings were massively built in the USSR, because the stairs of fire engines did not rise higher?

It is common that the height of a typical Soviet high -rise building determined the restriction related to fire special equipment. We checked how reasonable this version is.

When asked why in the 1970s the widespread widespread throughout the Soviet Union was the nine-story residential buildings, some bloggers and Internet users give a definite answer: all due to stairs on fire engines that could only rise to a height of about 28 m. Such an explanation can be found, for example, on the website of the publication "New Izvestia", portal StroyDay.ru, the popular blogger under the nickname Masterokas well as in social networks.

Since 1954, the construction of residential and non -residential buildings in the USSR regulated Legal acts, united under the general name “Construction Norms and Rules” (SNiP). Over the next decades, SNiPs were updated and supplemented. In many of these arches of the rules, there are separate chapters or sections devoted to fire safety.

In the mid-1950s were approved "Fire standards for the construction design of industrial enterprises and settlements." Although then the mass construction of nine -story buildings was still far away, the authors of the document have already regulated the number of storeys depending on several factors that determine the fire resistance of the building - first of all, we are talking about the materials used in construction. Nothing is said about the connection with the stairs on fire engines in this document. They are not mentioned in updated Rules 1962.

In 1964 appeared “Temporary instructions for fire requirements for the design of residential buildings ten floors or more high (for use in experimental design and construction).” The authors of the document emphasized that such residential buildings should be built from the maximum fireproof materials and are provided with an internal fire water supply. A separate chapter is devoted to evacuation exits - according to “temporary instructions”, the buildings above ten floors must be provided with “non -humble stairwells”, according to which residents can leave the house in case of fire.

The norms describing such evacuation stairs are fixed in the new edition of SNiP, approved in 1970. They apply to the design of residential buildings up to 25 floors inclusive. At the same time, the maximum possible number of floors all the same depends on the fire resistance of the materials, and on the presence of fire walls. Similar rules were recorded in editors 1985.

As can be seen from the regulatory acts of the Soviet era, the choice of precisely nine -story buildings for mass development is in no way connected with the capabilities of Soviet fire engines - at least formally. At the same time, it was the appearance of the tenth of the tenth of the ten -residential floor in the project that made the designers observe the more stringent requirements for the building, and not only fire fighting - for example, in such a house Demanded Install more elevators. The implementation of these standards made construction more expensive, so nine -story buildings were given preference.

The fact that the height of the nine -story buildings is approximately equal to the height of the standard staircase on the Soviet fire engine, apparently, only a coincidence. Moreover, already in the 1960s in the USSR released Firefighters with stairs rising to a height of more than 40 m, while the height of a nine -story residential building is about 30 m. At the same time, typical apartment buildings were built for 12, 14 and even 16 floors - for example, from series E-93, II-18/12, II-68 and others. The fact that many of them have not received such distribution as nine -story buildings associated with climate, soils, technical requirements, the difficulty of connecting to communications, economic expediency and other factors, but not with the height of stairs on fire engines.

Not true

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