Penthouse Fire Code / Rooftop Access

We just purchased an apartment in a 5 floor / 4 unit new development building. We are the penthouse unit with two floors. The top floor has a terrace facing the street. The common stairwell leads to this terrace for fire code reasons, and it has a fire code compliant alarm system to deter intruders from accessing our private terrace. However, there is a very large window next to the common stairwell door, which we just discovered has a latch that can open the window, basically giving intruders access to the terrace. We are trying to figure out if this window is a necessity because of fire code or potentially an oversight from the developers. We’d reach out to the developers ourselves, but they’ve been non-responsive on other issues and we don’t know who else we could potentially contact. Any advice would be appreciated.

Guest User | 5 years and 1 month ago

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icdmxqfh | 5 years and 1 month ago

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mdaschund, I’m an architect who works on these types of buildings, and I can’t think of any code (fire related or otherwise) reason why a window in the stair would need to be operable. It was likely an oversight. You should be able to disable the operation of that window.

MDR | 5 years and 1 month ago

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It sounds like the potential “intruders” would be your neighbors from one of the three other apartments in the building, is that right? And you’re worried about them climbing through the window for some unauthorized sunbathing or something? It doesn’t seem like a huge risk but couldn’t you just ask the building to put a permanent lock on the window?