To be fair while an old building it would conform to current regs would it not ? I would assume that evacuation would be hard because of chunks of roof not the layout. whilst obviously I do not know what actually happened yet, it would be quite possible that the building conformed to regulations, and that there is a suitable and achievable evacuation procedure in place. However such a process is often based on getting everybody out of the space within X time, and putting measures in place to make sure that the building will protect the people for at least that X time (fire curtains and firedoors, emergency lighting systems etc..) which would work fine for a conventional fire or similar event, but depending on how quickly the ceiling came down, it is entirely possible that this simply happened too quickly for the procedure to work. also depending on exactly what happened, if the emergency lighting is triggered by the alarm system, this may not have activated initially, which would also hinder the evacuation.
