A Roof on Fire, and Everyone Safe: What a 2023 Tbilisi Apartment Fire Teaches About Sharing a Building

On 16 August 2023, fire broke out on the roof of a residential building on Mtskheta Street in Tbilisi. Four fire brigades and ambulances were mobilised, the blaze was brought under control, and — the part that matters most — no one was injured. (Source: Rustavi 2.)

It is an easy story to scroll past precisely because it ended well. But that good ending is exactly the lesson. In an apartment block, a fire is never just one family's problem. Fire and smoke travel through shared roofs, stairwells, corridors and walls. When everyone gets out safely, it is rarely luck — it is the result of clear escape routes, fast alerting, and people knowing what to do.

Why a shared building changes the rules

When you live in a house, a fire is contained to your walls. In an apartment building, you share your fate with every other resident, because you share the things fire uses to spread and the single route you use to escape:

• One fire threatens everyone. A fire in one flat — or on the roof, as on Mtskheta Street — can fill the common stairwell with smoke and cut off the only way out for dozens of families.
• The stairwell is everyone's lifeline. In most buildings it is the *only* protected escape route. If it is blocked or full of smoke, people are trapped on the floors above.
• You can't see your neighbour's risk. You don't know if the family below leaves a heater on, or if the flat upstairs has a faulty wire. Your own protection can't depend on everyone else being careful.

The habits that keep a building safe

The Mtskheta Street outcome — everyone safe — is what these habits are designed to produce:

1. Keep the stairwell and corridors completely clear. No bikes, prams, old furniture, boxes, or — worst of all — gas cylinders. Clutter in a stairwell does two deadly things at once: it adds fuel, and it blocks the escape route exactly when people need it most.

2. Keep fire doors closed. Those heavy doors on landings and corridors exist to stop smoke flooding the stairwell. Never wedge them open or remove their self-closing hinges. A closed door can keep your only escape route usable.

3. Never use the lift. In a fire, a lift can stop between floors, and the shaft draws smoke upward like a chimney. Always take the stairs.

4. Know your way out — both ways if possible. Walk your route to the exit so you could find it in the dark or in smoke. Note where a second stair or exit is.

5. Look out for your neighbours. As you leave, alert others. Think now about who might need help — an elderly neighbour, someone disabled, a family with small children — and how you'd reach them.

The most important decision: get out, or stay put?

In an apartment building, escaping is not always the safest choice. The standard guidance:

• If the fire is in your own flat: get everyone out immediately, close the door behind you to contain it, alert neighbours as you go, and call 112 from outside. Never go back in.
• If the fire is elsewhere in the building and the corridor or stairwell is full of smoke: it is often *safer to stay in your flat* than to enter thick smoke. Close your door, seal the gap at the bottom with wet cloth, go to a window or balcony where you can get fresh air, call 112 and tell them your exact flat, and signal for help. A solid door buys you a great deal of time.

Knowing which choice is right — before it happens — is what turns panic into survival.

Why detectors and a way to act matter even more here

In a shared building you can't rely on hearing a neighbour's alarm through concrete walls. Your own smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors give you the early warning that lets you act while choices still exist. And because a small fire in your flat can become a whole building's emergency, keeping a fire-suppression ball or extinguisher within reach lets you stop it before it ever reaches the stairwell.

Everyone on Mtskheta Street walked away. With the right habits and the right tools, that is the ending every shared building can have — and it is exactly what ORDEX is built to help make ordinary.

Sources: Mtskheta Street residential building roof fire, Tbilisi (16 August 2023) — Rustavi 2. Apartment-building "stay put vs evacuate" guidance reflects standard fire-service practice. Emergencies: 112.