 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome to Unhinge with The DoorDork, but today we have a very special guest, Mr. Jason Grooms from Norton Rickson. Okay, you ready for the final photo? This one I actually took myself, so I've got the backstory on it. Are there steps down? Yes. Is this still under construction or is the yellow just the finished color of the room? Oh, the bright green, that's the company's brand. That's their branded color. Wow. I just found the exit sign. Yeah, no. The fact that it took you that long to find that sign. Oh my God. It's part of the problem, right? Yeah. Is that an air curtain? Yeah, it's one of those overhead doors, so it's like you can close it. Yeah. Wow, why is it blacked off? I mean, it shouldn't be, right? It's an exit. People are occupying this grocery store. I don't want to name names, but... Interesting. Maybe they don't want people stealing booster seats. So this is downtown Portland, so there is issues with ORC and theft like that. So I could get it, it's a side exit door. I could get that you would want to block it off, keep it inaccessible for that standpoint, because I'm sure they don't have someone stationed at this door at all times, or maybe they don't have the resources to have someone stationed at this door. So I get it from a security standpoint, but still, I mean, that right there tells you everything you need to know about this opening is it needs to be free of grass, right? It's definitely not ADA compliant either, which I'm guessing that the other people could go out other doors also. But in the case of an emergency, if someone walked through the front door with a gun, like this is your side door, this is your side exit. I know there's a back exit as well, but this is, if anyone's sitting at this cafe, this is gonna be their running point to escape. And you can't see it in the photo, but I went around to the outside and double checked it, and it is deadbolt thrown, locked, so it's not even free grass if you can get past the blue tape. I was gonna ask you what hardware is on there, cause I cannot tell. You can't see it, but there is an exit device underneath there, but then there's like an Adam's right, deadbolt thrown underneath there. I see that indicator, is it an exit only? So no, you could potentially enter from this side, and before I've entered from this side, it's actually a major street in Portland right there that people could enter, but when I went to enter, you couldn't because it was locked. So did you contact the AHA about this? Sadly to say no, not yet. I should have. Were you just waiting for our episode? You can't spoil it. Yeah, actually, I should get to know the AHA really well in Portland, cause there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. You're gonna be like, Fingy again. Yeah. There's a lot of wiring on top of that door. Yeah. But I keep going there. All that conduit, I mean, there's a lot to wire there as well. Also, like if you need that fire extinguisher, and I'm guessing there's probably a fire alarm down there as well, cause that would make sense. How are you gonna, in the case of emergency and you needed that fire extinguisher cause the, there's a kitchen right here. You could use that, but you might trip and fall and break something to try to get it. Well, even in like the- This is relatively new. The building is not new, but this addition is new-ish. They added this little cafe section to the store, maybe three-ish years ago, so somewhat new. And I have gone through this door before. So there have been times where it's been unlocked. Do you think they're just locking it at night, like past a certain point of the day? Yeah, but still, like if it's occupied- Right. I don't know. I might be wrong. Are there codes that deal with certain timings of the day? So if you know that your store's only gonna be occupied, like there's only gonna be this many people, but you can't ever know that if the building is open, right? A thousand people could show up and it's your obligation to make sure that they could exit safely. Safe. It's about an emergency. I think the mural on the wall is, like why it took me so long to see the exit sign. So for me, it's like part of the art. It just blends in because there's so much other stuff going on there that it like visually just disappears with everything else instead of being prominent. It's a lot to look at. And I only noticed the exit sign. Like it took me way too long to find the exit sign because you know, you would have thought it would been right here, right? That would make, but I guess because this is a lower landing, they got approved to put it up higher or something like that. Because if you're the other side of the store and you're exiting out this side, you'd need to be able to see it from the other side. And so maybe this wasn't the appropriate level. A lot of the problems are not necessarily related to the door around the door. Yeah, the hardware was working like it should, right? Like in a retail environment, you can have a deadbolt on a door. It just has to be unlocked during business hours, right? Right. When it's occupied. So if they had that unlocked and this was accessible, I mean, that's a little bit of a stretch for an exit sign, but I don't know if there'd be any blatant code violations. It's not the most accessible exit, but yeah, the fact that they had it blocked off and locked is the kicker. Because we've seen a lot of doors that are just blocked off, right, Mia? We've seen a lot of, there's just boxes or something in front of it, right? It's just not accessible. It's easy to remedy in that situation. Maybe it's on wheels or maybe there's a cart or something like that. Or maybe there's Batman. This, if the power goes out in the case of emergency and you're like panicking, there's smoke or something, you're going to run towards this exit. You're going to break your legs, tripping through the sanctions and then get down there with a bunch of other people and realize you can't exit. Like that's potentially could be a nightmare. I actually probably will have a nightmare about this. So maybe that's why it's blocked off because there's smoke in there. You're not going to be able to see that exit start. That's true. That's going to be very difficult to see. And with the recent code update, which will probably be three or four years before everyone adopts it nationwide, but they're required to have an exit sign down below the smoke line as well. So you should have an exit sign like down here and up here in the case of emergency. So you could see it because a lot of the times you ride, Jason, the smoke rises and will block that off. But I think it was IBC 2019 or something like that when that came out. So it'll probably be a couple more years before everyone starts adopting it. And then there'll be people that are grandfathered in because the building was built before all this and all that jazz, all the blue tape we have to get through to make buildings safe and secure, right? Okay. It's not like exciting or crazy in a lot of aspects but it's dangerous in a lot of aspects. So what do you think? Give it a knock and score. I think I want to give this one a five because we don't need to do anything. Well, maybe we don't need to do anything drastic to fix the problem, but there definitely needs to be a discussion. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing like blatantly code violations that couldn't just be a conversation with the facility manager or the general manager of the store. I'm with you on that, but if there wasn't that conversation, there could be potential very scary situations as I'm sure you could agree with. I'm at an eight because right now it's non-compliant but it can be fixed. Like it could be fixed momentarily except for that exit sign. I don't care if they got that approved. That's terrible placement. You're never going to see that in an actual emergency. And I get it, most people in a case of emergency in a public setting, they go out the entrance that they came in, right? That's our just instinct as to backtrack to where we go. But if that's where the incident is happening, then you're going to be looking for another opportunity to escape and this is your spot to escape. So you're going to be looking for those exit signs and so I'm with you. That's very hard to see. It took all of us way too long to see that, right? Honestly, like you should have a conversation with the store manager, but you could bring the AHA into this, but like nothing really needs to be fixed. Like we don't need to call in a locksmith or somebody to actually fix anything here. It's retraining is what needs to happen. So like I'm hesitant to go full 10 on this one because all the right parts are there. Yeah, I 100% agree with both of you. If it's able to be resolved, then it's not a problem. If it's not being resolved, then there's a big problem. Maybe you're scaring me into attend here because maybe there's a huge issue. It doesn't have to do with the door, but those stairs, I think you're absolutely right. If you remove that blue tape and somebody's running for the exit or if there's smoke, how do they know that there's stairs there? That's a broken leg waiting to happen, right? Yeah, but there can be stairs on other paths of egress. Yeah, I mean, they do have the caution tape there that hopefully is reflective. I don't know that hopefully you see that, but if everything was dark and it was smoky, it would be hard to see. I don't know, I'm torn. It's a 10 on one day and it's a five on another day because yeah, people could get hurt, but probably won't knock on wood door. Okay, final answers. What do you give it? I mean, it's a 10 today in my bucket, but tomorrow it could be easily a five. Not too knocking bad in the way that we have to fix it. Like something has to physically be changed to make happen. It's more of a, like Mia said, a training aspect. I think by itself today, if nothing changed, it's almost a domino effect. It's kind of crazy. I go into buildings and it's just the way that my mind works is like, if the worst case scenario happened right now, what would I do? It was almost natural. I think mine's just like turned up to a certain extent because I know better, right? So in this situation, if I pictured myself running for this exit because someone walked in with a gun, tripping, following, breaking my leg, been trying to get out, realizing I can't get out and you're just trapped there with a bunch of other people. Because it's a pretty busy store. I mean, there was probably at least 100-ish people in this store when I was there. Obviously it's larger, so they're all spread out and there's other exits. I actually didn't check the back exits. I probably should have. Hopefully they're working because that would be my second go-to route. So does that answer your question, Jason? 10 today, five tomorrow. Let me pull with Karen and let me speak to the manager. Yeah. Well, Jason, thanks again for joining us for your second Door Hardware Nerd video. Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day and spending some time and knocking and slamming on some doors with us. Thanks for your insight and your input. And for those of you that are watching, join us for the next episode of Unhinged. Our doors are always open, partially because they're unhinged. If you want to be featured on a future episode of Unhinged or if you have a photo to submit, leave a comment down below or you can email me at Mia at doorhardwarenerds.com.