Residential fire safety often stops at alarms and extinguishers, but a growing number of homes and small buildings still lack safe, usable secondary escape routes. Safer Escape has introduced a built-in, retractable ladder system designed to offer a permanent and immediately deployable means of egress during a fire.
Barry Mezei, Chief Operating Officer of Safer Escape, founded the company after witnessing a devastating house fire in his neighbourhood in 2021.
With no safe exit from the upper floor, residents were forced to jump from the roof, resulting in several hospitalisations. The incident exposed a critical weakness in residential fire safety – one that Mezei felt personally compelled to address.
From its inception, Safer Escape has been driven by a commitment to practical, life-saving solutions. The company’s mission is to ensure that no one faces the impossible choice between waiting for rescue and jumping from a window.
By combining technical innovation with hands-on education, Safer Escape is working to equip families, businesses, and institutions with safe, accessible secondary means of escape.
Barry Mezei
With a focus on improving evacuation speed, stability, and accessibility, Safer Escape aims to address modern fire safety challenges across different settings. In this interview, Barry Mezei discusses fire safety gaps, product design, code compliance, and how expectations around residential fire protection are evolving.
Many homes and smaller structures lack sufficient, accessible secondary escape routes. Traditional rope ladders are hard to deploy under stress and very slow to descend, leaving others in harm’s way while waiting their turn on the ladder to make an acrobatic exit and external staircases are expensive and often unattractive. Safer Escape set out to fill this critical gap with a safer, simpler and faster solution.
Safer Escape is a company committed to enhancing emergency evacuation options. They specialize in designing permanently mounted, easy-to-use fire escape ladders for second and third story homes, businesses and institutions that lack traditional secondary exits.
Secondary egress solutions are often overlooked due to cost, aesthetics and practical challenges. Many property owners rely solely on alarms, occasionally sprinklers or hope the primary exit will be available. There’s also a real lack of awareness about how vital a second way out can be during a real fire emergency.
Unlike rope ladders, the Safer Escape Ladder is permanently and discretely attached to the home or building outside a window. It is always ready for immediate use, offering a sturdy, easy-to-climb escape route without requiring assembly, strength, or complicated deployment during an emergency.
The Safer Escape Ladder typically uses high-strength, corrosion-resistant anodized aluminum or similar materials. These were chosen for their durability, lightweight properties and long-term outdoor exposure without deterioration.
Compared to external staircases, which can be very expensive, visually intrusive and require significant space and structural modifications, the Safer Escape Ladder is much more cost-effective, discreetly attached outside a window, and minimally impacts the building’s appearance.
It provides the critical safety benefits of a secondary exit without the architectural and budgetary challenges that often discourage home & property owners from installing traditional fire escapes.
Barry Mezei
The ladder is mounted securely outside a designated egress window or opening. In an emergency, a person simply opens the window, deploys the ladder quickly by removing the locking pin and extending the ladder, and climbs down safely. The design ensures rapid, intuitive use under the stressful conditions of a fire and is operable even by children.
The system is designed for repeated practice as part of a larger fire safety plan, so that escape becomes instinctual.
It is important to remember that, statistically, most occupants of a structure fire die from smoke inhalation and not burns. It takes as little as two minutes to pass out or die from smoke inhalation.
Barry Mezei
The importance of a rapid exit from the house cannot be overstated and Safer Escape ladder is designed to address this need for rapid escape.
The ladder is rated for a weight of 2,000lbs which can easily accommodate simultaneous escape by a family from multiple levels. On average 4-5 people can escape to the ground in around 30 seconds.
The Safer Escape Ladder has been evaluated in the newly released ICC-ES Evaluation Report ESR-4824. The ICC-ES evaluation report ESR-4824 is considered supporting data from an Approved Source under Section 104.11 of the International Residential Code® (IRC), Section 104.11 of the International Building Code® (IBC) and Section 104.10 of the International Fire Code® (IFC) under the provisions for “Alternative materials, design and methods of construction and equipment.”
Safer Escape encourages customers to integrate the ladders into broader fire emergency plans. They provide guidance on optimal ladder placement, usage instructions and the importance of conducting regular evacuation drills to ensure familiarity and preparedness.
