Re: skyscraper fire suppression

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 10:53 PM 9/16/01 -0400, Hugh Haskell wrote:
> Since all the electricity in the building was lost almost
> immediately, I assume that the pumps for the fire mains were also at
> risk. Even if the firefighters could have gotten to the area where
> the fire was, would they have had any water, or more preferably, for
> a fuel fire, CO2?

The WTC buildings were designed to withstand any reasonable fire for
several hours, because they had sprinklers, and because the structural
steel was shielded by concrete and/or asbestos.

But this was not a reasonable fire.  No building is designed to deal with
this kind of fire.  The designers tell the tenants:  It is forbidden to
bring 24,000 gallons of kerosene into the building.

When fighting a fuel fire, CO2 doesn't stick around well enough.  Foam is
preferred.  That's what airport CFR (crash/fire/rescue) squads use.

Most buildings store water in a tank on the roof.  This means fire
suppression continues to work during a disaster (any disaster of reasonable
proportions).  It also means that bathrooms continue to work if there is a
non-disastrous power outage, which is a useful feature, too.

There is also provision whereby fire trucks can pressurize the sprinkler
system using the pumps in the trucks.  Serious pumps.  For a fire of
reasonable proportions, this gives quite a lot of fire suppression even
before the firefighters go into the building.  But alas they need to be in
the shadow of the building, which is not good if there is going to be a
sooner-than-expected collapse.

Remember, the 9/11 attack was waaaay outside the envelope of what such
systems can be expected to handle.  The initial impact presumably severed
many of the pipes and control circuits.  So the sprinkler system was
presumably not going to work properly.

Still, the answer is yes, if firefighters had been able to get to where the
action was, they could have had water.  Not foam, but at least water.  They
would have had to find a valve below where the pipes were broken, close the
valve, hook up a hose at that point, and drag the hose up the stairs from
there.  Nightmarish, but possible.  I wouldn't be surprised if they
actually managed to do all this on Tuesday.

At 01:00 AM 9/17/01 -0400, Hugh Haskell wrote:
> Apparently the problems with the buildings was
> only the final snafu in a disaster that, as seems to be emerging,
> didn't have to happen at all.

Problems with the buildings?  The buildings did amazingly well, I
thought.  Is there any halfway comparable building that would have done better?

Didn't have to happen?  I don't understand.  Does that mean to say that
this could easily have been prevented?  I don't see how.