This is our only exit other than the front door at work. We keep asking the boss to move it and he says no. Been there over 6 months. We sometimes wonder which of the 30 of us would make it out of the fire.

My city's fire department web page has an online message box where you can report fire code violations. I used this once to report that a church I was attending was in the habit of using those red-painted crash-bar locks on all the emergency exit doors, in an effort to prevent people with keys to the building (of whom there were tons) from unlocking the door to get inside and do church stuff, and then omitting to relock them upon leaving.

The crash bar lock means that even if you have a key, the door won't open from the outside. And it also means that a tide of panicky bodies rushing away from an explosion wouldn't be able to hit the crash bar and get the door open. You'd have to back up, perform whatever motion is required to enable the door to open, and then hit the crash bar and escape. Fire codes require that an exit door takes only a single motion to open.

I would have said, Call in all the keys and rekey all the doors, then be more careful about who you give keys to. But no, instead they locked all the emergency exits.

So I reported them on the FD website, and the next week the locks were gone.

In a separate, earlier, incident, they were also using the emergency stairway down from a second story of classrooms as a storage area, so you had to pick your way carefully down the stairs full of junk. Kicker: there was no window in the stairwell, and no window in the exit door at the bottom, so it was pitch-dark, except that there was a light, on the outside of the stairway at the top of the stairs--on a timer. A very short timer. If you weren't done picking your way down the stairs by the time the timer was done, you were left in the pitch-black, halfway down a stairway full of junk, with the building possibly burning behind you.

I mentioned this to the church custodian one day, "Yanno, it's probably a fire safety violation to be storing all that junk there like that. What if there was a fire?" and she got this real thoughtful look on her face.

In her predecessor's time, the church had failed a scheduled fire marshal's inspection due to the church storing boxes and boxes (and boxes and boxes) of discarded sheet music, courtesy of a previous choir director, in a totally fire-unsafe manner in a small basement classroom. If there ever had been a fire, that room would have burned like a blowtorch.

Also, they had filled up the basement mechanical room (furnace, water heater) with junk including but not limited to a wood-and-cardboard puppet stage, all the old wooden tiny children's chairs made obsolete by the new plastic tiny children's chairs, a collection of baby high chairs, and a popcorn machine.

The failure of that inspection meant that the previous custodian had gotten stuck with the job of finding new homes for all of it.

So, a couple weeks after I mentioned the stairway to the custodian, the junk was gone.

I always had the feeling from those people that they felt that God wouldn't let anything bad happen to their church, so it was somehow okay to store a wooden puppet stage and 50 wooden chairs next to the furnace and water heater, and fill up the emergency exit stairway with junk.

So maybe the OP's company is just real religious?

/r/OSHA Thread Link - imgur.com