Thursday Morning Reads — Double Shot of Will Edition

Also… rest rooms do not have smoke detectors, they work off of localized heat detection from the sprinkler head which only activates theone or two sprinklers involved, which trips a flow switch and sounds alarms in that single fire/smoke compartment sector and close the horizontal exiting door for that compartment only. Same design used in hospitals and correction centers. If a stadium has say 12 fire/smoke compartments per level, in all likelihood comatyment1 will not know an alarm was sounded in compartment 7 so panic is not created stadium wide.

Let me say first I have not seen the full plans or Life Safety plan for the stadium. I would think based on your experiences with night clubs, and Assembly occupancies you have the right idea with your LSC citation (which based on the numbering system is from a pre-2000 Edition of the LSC). The actual code is located in section 7.10 of the current edition enforced in this state (2012). In a conventional Assembly occupancy, this 100 foot requirement to see a sign (which in a straight line of vision could technically have signage at a maximum of 200 feet) would be enforced on the “not readily apparent to the occupants” definition. I would assume that each level and fire compartment has the min. signage for the min. legal egress load per exit per compartment. This is a wholly prescriptive requirement approach to enforcement and design used on the min. allowed routes of egress. However a structure can add additional egress routes which when used (shutters that automatically open directly to other egress paths, like when we counter flow I-16) could met the requirements as being readily apparent to the occupants which would not require additional signage. Reasons to ‘hide’ these routes, are crowd control and not letting bad guys know where every exit could be.
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As I mentioned above, stadiums are normally designed using a subsection of the Life Safety Code, which can be found in LSC 101A, Guide on Alternative Approaches to Life Safety. They require a Life Safety Evaluation (LSE). Some require egress timing models (how fast can you empty a stadium) smoke and fire modeling simulators, and a smoke Evacuation model. Large stadiums also use horizontal egress, and fire compartments. In a health care occupancy, a hospital can not be fully evacuated at any point in time. If a fire starts in a patient room and spreads to two other rooms, your not going to evacuate the surgical unit on the same floor 2000 feet away that has a person hooked up to a heart bypass machine. Healthcare allows a hospital to have fire compartments. Horizational exits could reduce the required number of egress paths off a level based on total occupant load by shifting a population from one fire compartment to another, as they do in prisons. We are not going to fully exit a super max prison, but you can relocate a person to a safer compartment, buying the occupants an extra two to three hours of safety to put the fire out. You can apply the same concepts to large stadiums.
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In theory you can apply alternative concepts to small assembly spaces (like a 400 person concert venue) over the more restrictive prescriptive code if one is willing to justify the cost. A smoke evaluation for a smoke evacuating system in a small concert hall could cost $20,000 to run and calculate the fan and louver sizing, plus another $60,000 for the roof level fans, automated door and louver hardware and the laser detection system to activate the system, when adding 3 extra marked doors could cost only $5,000 tops.
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Here is some info on large scale alternative methods.
http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/publications/nfpa-journal/2014/july-august-2014/in-compliance/nfpa-101
http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/publications/nfpa-journal/2014/july-august-2014/pov/perspectives