Here is the link to the National Fire Protective Association web site.   The NFPA analyzes fires around the world and provides building code fire safety recommendations for every type of venue - churches, schools, clubs, etc.  

What can you do as a citizen?   

1.   Take a look for emergency exits every time you go into a building.  Plan your way out before there is an emergency.

2.   Tell the managment you are concerned if you visit facilities that you feel are unsafe.  

3.   Don't patronize large (50+persons) venues that aren't sprinklered.  

4.   Make a public comment about the facility on the web - on a web site like Realneo - negative publicity has the potential to hit the venue owner in the wallet and bring about safety improvement. 

Oh, and you can practice holding your breath....but that probably won't save you.   If you want to get an idea about how fast an interior space can become an gassed up inferno, read through this Station failure review on Wikispaces.com - quoted below:

"Egress

According to NIST’s official report on the incident, 2/3 of the crowd attempted to exit the building through the front doors, just one of the four exits in the facility. For over a minute, patrons exited at an orderly rate of a little over one occupant / second. Within 90 seconds of the ignition time however, a crowd crush occurred at this exit, almost entirely halting the flow of patrons. At this time, it appears the large windows at the front of the building became a secondary route of escape, as a reported 1/3 of those who successfully exited the building exited through these windows. A fire test conducted showed temperatures and combustion gases to be well in excess of survivability limits within the club area at the 90 second mark. The reason for the crowd crush was likely a combination of 1) the panic induced by the rapidly worsening conditions, and 2) the poor egress path to the front doors, requiring merging streams of traffic to pass through a single interior door, as shown in Figure 2 (NIST 2005). "