What Is Egress Law?

What Is Egress Law? Egress laws refer to the accessibility to rooms as well as the ability to exit a room, often in an emergency situation. One of the biggest comments we see, especially from those who have never seen The Boot, or The LockOut System, is, “You can’t install that system, it violates fire codes!”.

While we do agree that some door barricade devices violate fire codes, specifically egress law, we are proud that The Boot, and further, all of the products we make at The LockOut Company, do not violate any of these laws in the states in which we operate.

Fire codes are incredibly important, and egress laws are some of the most important of the bunch. Fire marshals work tirelessly to ensure that building occupants, and especially students, are safe in the event of an evacuation. Installing a device that would hinder evacuation by breaking egress law is dangerous and irresponsible, and should never occur.

We wrote previously about The Importance of Code Compliance When Installing a Lockdown System in which we reference a school that was forced to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to remove a system which they had recently installed due to that system violating egress law.

Violating egress law is not only expensive, it’s dangerous. If the occupants of any building cannot easily exit a room when needed, even during a lockdown, or first responders can’t easily access the room to get to those who may potentially be in need, any lockdown system, no matter how pure the intentions of the creators, becomes a danger to those it is designed to help.

At The LockOut Company, we designed The Boot door barricade and the LockOut System as a whole to meet egress law from day one. For the safety of those we protect on a daily basis, we never disclose how certain aspects of The Boot make it egress compliant, except to important staff and law enforcement personnel, but we can say that we are proud that the installation of our door barricade and lockdown system do not create a potentially unsafe environment for those we are working to protect.

We work closely with, and under the scrutiny of, fire and law enforcement officials. If, at any time, those officials inform us that they are concerned with any application of our system within a school, we immediately work to change that application.

No system is perfect, but every system should be designed around the total safety of those it is designed to protect.