Hospitals Don’t Burn Down

Synopsis

Fire breaks out after midnight in a multi-storey hospital, cutting the top floors off from escape. It spreads quickly, due to poor housekeeping. Despite the prompt action of the Fire Department, lack of fire safety training results in 9 fatalities including a child.

Impact

The Director's Statement

In the new world order of corporate media, the true documentary is more valuable than ever. Every society needs independent voices to depict social issues accurately in the public forum. Will a network owned by a conglomerate with oil interests report honestly on the impact of an oil spill? Documentaries need the funding of altruists with no commercial agenda. Philanthropists must recognize a duty to fund documentaries, because government, increasingly, will not.

It was not always so. I make features and television movies in Los Angeles these days, but once upon a time, in 1977, when documentary was not a dirty word, I was commissioned by the Veteran Affairs Department and Film Australia to make a fire safety film in the form of a dramatized documentary. HOSPITALS DON'T BURN DOWN re-enacted the first half hour when a serious fire starts in the basement of a hospital, then spreads up the laundry chute, ultimately trapping a children's ward and the intensive care unit. The film demonstrated by example both the circumstances that can lead to fires in an environment full of chemicals and a largely unsupervised public, and the " do's and don'ts " should a fire break out. HOSPITALS or "The Towering Infirmary" as we came to call it during 21 long nights of filming, was then shown to all new staff at Australian hospitals within their first week, and continued to be shown for the next 20 years. It did similar service as a high rise building safety film across the world.

It won several awards, and still holds the record, I believe, as Film Australia's highest selling industrial film. Its first year of screening throughout Australian hospitals brought about many changes in safety procedures and layout. One lesson in the re-enactment was that non-ambulatory patients, like those in ICU, should not be kept on higher floors. Upon seeing the film, a 4 story hospital in northern New South Wales relocated its ICU from the top floor to the ground floor. Four months later, the top floor caught fire and was ultimately gutted, happily without injury or loss of life. This little known documentary film of mine has brought more benefit to its audience than any genre movie I have made before or since.