[NYC-L] FW: NYTimes.com Article: Evacuation Plans Due for High Rises in New York City

[Jeton Ademaj]

please forward this to any loved one who's ever near a high rise, 
particularly any NYC high rise built since the 1960's...seriously.

tony


>The article below from NYTimes.com
>has been sent to you by jeton at hotmail.com.
>
>
>Evacuation Plans Due for High Rises in New York City
>
>August 5, 2004
>  By JIM DWYER
>
>
>More than 11 years after terrorists first struck at the
>World Trade Center, the city is still struggling to
>complete guidelines for evacuating high-rise buildings
>where thousands of workers would face vital questions of
>what to do if their skyscraper were to come under attack.
>
>Under a new city law that takes effect at the end of
>September, though, the Fire Department is, for the first
>time, drafting rules for evacuations of large commercial
>buildings in case of a terrorist attack or a natural
>disaster. The purpose of the rules, officials say, is to
>require owners of big buildings to at last prepare detailed
>plans, train staff members and conduct full evacuation
>drills of the building every three years.
>
>Until now, owners of tall office buildings in New York and
>most major cities in the United States had been required to
>do little more than organize fire drills. Tenants usually
>did not leave the buildings, or in many cases, even their
>floors. "This is a dramatic change in how we view getting
>people out of buildings that have fires but also
>non-fire-related emergencies, like explosions, biological
>and chemical releases, any hazardous materials," said
>Nicholas Scoppetta, the fire commissioner.
>
>Yet the new drills - which gained yet another jolt of
>urgency with this week's terror alerts focused on landmark
>buildings in the city - will continue to put heavy emphasis
>on what the real estate industry is calling "invacuations."
>In those situations, tenants would not move outside the
>building, but simply a few floors away from the hazard or
>to a designated refuge.
>
>That strategy, which dates to the early 1970's, is based on
>considerations of both safety and practicality, officials
>say. The stairways in a building or the streets outside
>could be more dangerous than staying put. Moreover, many
>New York skyscrapers built since 1968 simply do not have
>enough stairways to allow all the occupants to go down at
>the same time when emergency workers are coming up.
>
>Even so, all those involved acknowledge that persuading
>people to remain inside a building that has been attacked
>or threatened has become much harder after the collapse of
>the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
>
>"Since 9/11, a lot of people have made the decision to
>self-evacuate, for whatever reason," said Roberta M.
>McGowan, the executive director of the Building Owners and
>Managers Association of Greater New York.
>
>Vincent Dunn, a retired fire chief and an authority on
>high-rise fire safety, said the rapid collapse of the trade
>center's towers undermined the public's faith that such
>buildings could resist and contain fire. "On 9/11, the
>people who did not follow instructions to stay put were the
>ones who survived," Mr. Dunn said. "The people who followed
>the instructions did not survive."
>
>In testimony before the national commission investigating
>the attacks, Alan Reiss, who had overseen the trade center
>for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey until
>shortly before Sept. 11, also said that the standard advice
>no longer carried weight.
>
>"No one is going to listen to a fire safety director making
>an announcement that says 'stay and let the other people
>evacuate first,' " Mr. Reiss told the panel in May.
>"Everyone, including myself, and we have had a couple of
>fires in the building that I am now a tenant in - that fire
>alarm goes off and you smell smoke, everyone is down the
>stairs instantaneously."
>
>That impulse can lead people into more serious problems,
>officials agree, and underscores the need for specific,
>convincing and enforceable rules to be adopted by the city.
>
>
>Donald P. Bliss, director of the National Center for
>Infrastructure Expertise, said: "One thing you don't want
>to happen is evacuate people into a worse situation. If
>there's a secondary device, or some type of biohazard or
>other problem, you want people to stay sheltered in the
>building."
>
>In the case of a car or truck bomb, shards of glass would
>be a devastating hazard, said Jack J. Murphy, the director
>of the Fire Safety Directors Association. A biological or
>chemical attack could make the stairs or lobbies dangerous.
>Part of the new emergency planning will require people
>familiar with building ventilation systems, who can make
>sure that ducts are shut off to prevent the spread of
>contamination, Mr. Murphy said.
>
>The new plans could include the use of elevators -
>generally ruled out in fires - to move people who could not
>negotiate stairs. However, said Desmond J. Burke, who
>studied the emergency planning issues for the Buildings
>Owners and Managers Association, elevators serve as pistons
>that push air through shafts throughout a building.
>
>The new evacuation plans are the first requirements under a
>law signed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in June, following
>a study of the events of Sept. 11 led by Patricia J.
>Lancaster, the commissioner of the City Buildings
>Department.
>
>Other changes will come at a decidedly slower pace,
>including a requirement for backup power for stairway
>lights and exit signs, sprinklers and luminescent paint for
>stairwells. These will be made mandatory in office
>buildings between 2006 and 2019.
>
>These improvements had been made inside the trade center
>after the 1993 bombing, and they were generally regarded as
>being helpful during the evacuation in 2001. In fact, some
>of these changes were originally recommended by a city task
>force in 1993, after the first attack on the trade center,
>but were not acted on until this year, after legislation
>proposed by the mayor passed the City Council.
>
>A number of changes urged by Ms. Lancaster's task force
>were viewed with skepticism by the real estate industry,
>including wider staircases and special "fire tower stairs"
>used in older skyscrapers. She noted that the space devoted
>to staircases meant less rentable space on each floor. "One
>inch on every staircase in every high rise is hundreds of
>thousands of dollars," Ms. Lancaster said.
>
>The city building code adopted in 1968 drastically
>curtailed the number of stairways required for skyscrapers,
>making it hard, if not impossible, for everyone in a tall
>building to leave at the same time, particularly if
>rescuers are trying to come up. According to a study by the
>National Institute of Standards and Technology, the 1968
>code effectively permitted the Port Authority to decrease
>the number of stairwells in the trade center from six to
>three in each of the towers - a change sought by the real
>estate industry so that more space on each floor would be
>available for rent. (The Empire State Building, which
>opened in 1931, has nine staircases at its base.)
>
>That code also eliminated another evacuation feature that
>the real industry felt ate up too much valuable space: the
>fire tower stairs, a stairway protected by four inches of
>concrete that was entered through a kind of air lock that
>protected the stairway from smoke.
>
>The availability of staircases at the trade center was a
>matter of life and death. Many people survived the initial
>impact of the plane crashes, but were unable to find a way
>downstairs, as five of the six stairways in the two towers
>became impassable.
>
>The city task force decided that it would wait for the
>final report from the standards and technology agency
>before acting on recommendations to require more stairway
>space and fire towers in new construction, Ms. Lancaster
>said. She noted that computer models now are able to
>predict fine details on how many people can move through a
>staircase. One major financial company, while building a
>new headquarters, used a computer model to study how many
>of its employees would able to evacuate if three bombs were
>exploded inside 20 minutes on different floors, according
>to Ms. Lancaster. The plans showed that many employees
>would still be able to escape.
>
>"You have to balance safety and stimulate economic
>development," Ms. Lancaster said. "If New York City wants
>to keep being the world's second home, we need its
>occupants to feel safe."
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/nyregion/05evacuate.html?ex=1092730844&ei=1&en=4d22ce63b8f4c621

>Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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