Re: WTC structural site

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 21:17 -0500 9/16/01, brian whatcott wrote:

> Another prime lesson that needs to be learned is that stranding people
> in upper stories of skyscapers, with no escape roiute until a fire
> is extinguished is unacceptable.

We have been running away from this problem for years. Maybe now we
will have the backbone to address it.

As I mentioned before, it doesn't seem that adequate planning was
made for the exit stairs to handle the load put on them. They filled
with smoke and dust, and the people trying to get out and the
firefighters tryuing to get up clearly interfered with each other.
That is unacceptable, and can have no effect other than slowing the
evacuation down even more than  was planned for.

And giving the building only a two-hour lifetime after a severe fire
is simply condemning the firefighters to death. Considering the large
number of firefighters who died in the collapse, it is clear that
they were not aware of the danger. I hope that will now be corrected.

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?

I have to admit, I am at a total loss to imagine a practical way to
get people out of the upper stories of a burning skyscraper, short of
stashing a set of parachutes for everyone on every floor high enough
to allow time for them to open. That's a pretty dicey operation, too,
although I guess I would prefer it to jumping without one. With the
volume of smoke billowing from the building, helicopters were out of
the question, and even if they were there, could they have handled
the couple of thousand people who could well have been up there? It
may be that the people above the fire will have to be "written off."
That doesn't make me feel very warm and glowy about ever going to
those levels.

There was also a story of a woman who was wheelchair-bound, on the
68th floor, who ended up being carried all the way to the ground by
two absolutely selfless men who came upon her. That was an act of
heroism equivalent to almost anything else I heard of that day. But
I'll bet she wasn't the only wheelchair-bound person in either
building, and it is clear that there is *no* provision for getting
them out.

I have to agree with you, Brian. I don't think those buildings
performed anywhere near what we have been led to expect. I hope that
the owners and operators, as well as the tenants, of every other
too-tall skyscraper in the world are seriously looking at their
structures to see what can be done to make them safer--not just
against terrorists, but against all sorts of natural and unnatural
disasters that can befall a building. I wonder just how well those
towers in Kuala Lumpur will stand up to the next magnitude 8
earthquake that hits the city.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
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