I love those signs that read “OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN ____ PERSONS IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL.”
How do they determine the number? When they’re building the place, do they see how many of their construction workers they can shove into the room before it becomes uncomfortable and then just go with that?
Are they accounting for the wide variety of extreme body types that are out there? Say the limit is 60 people. Is that 60 of “any size” people? What I’m saying is, if you were to clone the world’s fattest man 59 times, would it be dangerous and unlawful to put him, along with all 59 of his clones, in the room together? What about those really skinny, string-bean style children? Can you still only fit 60, or more like 160 of them because they take up so little space?
A more thorough method, though a slightly more difficult one, would be to find the weight of the average human being. Then, you build a platform scale on the floor of each room’s entrance. Every time someone enters, his/her weight is added to a group sum, the maximum of which is the room’s maximum potential occupancy. In other words, the potential capacity of a room capable of fitting 60 people would be reached by taking 60 people, multiplied by an average human weight of 137 pounds, for a grand total maximum occupancy of 8,220 pounds. So, you could fit 82 dangerously underweight persons, 60 average-sized persons, or 22 morbidly obese persons.
Although, if you blew up 1,000 giant beachballs in a relatively big room with only a 2 or 3 people, that’d be pretty dangerous and possibly unlawful, despite the fact that the total weight would be very low.
There’s really no right answer, I guess.
Until next time,
Michael J. Erickson, CEO & Co-Founder
