A New View of High-Rise Firefighting

Modern firefighting and rescue, built upon hard lessons from deadly disasters going back more than a century, had two fundamental beliefs shattered in the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

For firefighters, the rule for saving lives and property in a burning high-rise is to attack the fire from inside the building. At least 300 men performing that duty on Sept. 11 are presumed dead.

For high-rise workers, the rule is to stay put until told to evacuate. Numerous accounts from the World Trade Center show an unknown number--probably in the hundreds--made up their minds to flee despite receiving instructions to remain. In so doing, they saved their lives.

These disturbing turnabouts are haunting urban fire officials across America, forcing them to reexamine their practices, as well as their defense role on the front lines of domestic terrorism.

In the months and years ahead, the collapse of the twin towers will be studied intently by architects, engineers and public policy experts. While most refrain from making quick judgments, they say they will examine reforms that could include limits on building height, more heat insulation for steel beams, widening and reinforcing stairwells, and requiring evacuation drills.

“We’re going to rewrite the book as far as how we’re going to handle incidents like that--terrorist incidents in large mega-structures,” said Glenn Corbett, professor of fire science at John Jay College in New York and technical editor of Fire Engineering magazine.

The enormity of the loss is moving many fire officials to consider changes.

This is especially true in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, home to landmark buildings such as the 110-story Sears Tower, the 48-story Transamerica Pyramid and the 73-story Library Tower.

The Los Angeles Fire Department tried one experiment on the day of the attack. A helicopter armed with a water cannon to shoot foam at brush fires was reconfigured with a petroleum foam that could be shot into a high-rise.

“Would it work?” asked Deputy Los Angeles Fire Chief Robert Neamy. “It’s better than doing nothing.”

More attention will be focused on how to get people out of a doomed high-rise and reduce risks for firefighters.

“I’m not suggesting parachutes for everyone, but could we have some faster means of egress?” asked Rae Archibald, vice president of enterprise analysis at Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica.

Some of Archibald’s ideas border on the exotic, such as micro-sensors to warn of structural failure and Mars-lander-like robots prepositioned to fight fire by remote control. But he and others also are looking for ways to make elevators more available in emergencies.

Far more deliberation can be expected to precede changes in training and tactics. Fire officials, as well as building engineers and lawmakers, are concerned about overreacting to an event that might never be repeated, while other dangers brew undetected.

But images of the World Trade Center collapsing on firefighters will forever haunt those in the profession, said Harry Carter, president of the International Society of Fire Service Instructors and a veteran firefighter.

Total Collapse Wasn’t Considered

Until now, firefighting tactics have been built on the assumption that a fire would never topple a modern high-rise.

“From here on out, this fire is going to pop right into their minds,” he said. “When they approach a high-rise fire, many will picture the building doing just what the World Trade Center did. And they will ask themselves, ‘Why should our building act any differently?’ ”

One consequence could be revisions to the practice of setting command posts nearby, sometimes on the first floor of a burning high-rise. Placing the command post at the foot of the World Trade Center cost many their lives.

“They did what they were trained to do,” said John M. Eversole, a retired chief of the Chicago Fire Department. “But we’ve never seen a situation like this before. Now maybe we want to start setting up a few blocks away.”

A more troubling question is whether there are circumstances in which firefighters should stay out of a burning high-rise, which is unthinkable under current tactics.

Before Sept. 11, the only considerations were “how, when and where we put our people in” the building, said Eversole, who retired about a month ago after more than two decades of firefighting. “We now will have to make a decision on whether this is not a safe building to go into.”

The New York attack also should lead to greater federal funding of fire departments, according to one lawmaker.

“When terrorists strike, our fire and emergency medical service people are the first responders,” said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on readiness and leading advocate of the fire service. “The Marines have an emergency team that can be sent to any city. But what do you do during [the] first 24 hours? You send the fire department.”

Weldon is seeking more federal money to equip and train firefighters for situations that could include biological agents and suitcase-size nuclear bombs. Weldon, a former firefighter, said fire departments must consider that Russia cannot account for more than 80 “small atomic demolition munitions,” which, he said, could be in the hands of terrorists.

‘No-Go’ Decision Would Meet Resistance

The potential for other types of terrorists acts may also instill a new caution.

“Now there will be more of an emphasis on other incidents that include high-explosive bombing of a building that includes potential structural collapse,” said Pete Howes, spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department.

Any consideration of a “no-go” decision would meet resistance from the deeply ingrained firefighters’ creed of risking their own lives to save others.

“No incident commander I know of would hold firefighters outside a fully occupied building and let it burn,” said Russ Sanders, retired Louisville, Ky., fire chief and now executive secretary of the National Fire Protection Assn., metro chiefs section. “It just would be unacceptable.”

Other experts point out that commanders are trained to order withdrawals from more conventional structures when they see signs of imminent collapse. In a recent case, a commander in Worcester, Mass., called off the attempted rescue of several firefighters from a burning warehouse. The only new question is whether the same type of analysis should now apply to high-rise fires.

Neamy suggested that the solution may lie in new tactics that everyone hopes will never be used.

“If we had a fire today, I would not change anything--if we had a fire in a high-rise building,” Neamy said. “But if we had an airplane into a building, we’d have to look at it differently.”

Neamy said the L.A. Fire Department is conducting studies to calculate the effects of an airplane impact on a high-rise in Los Angeles so commanders can make informed decisions.

Other fire experts said there will be considerable interest in interviewing people who escaped the towers, to learn what they saw or heard that may have foretold the collapse. In the future, firefighters could be trained to watch for those signs of danger--cues that require them to leave behind any victims and “get out,” said Arthur E. Cote, senior vice president and chief engineer of the NFPA.

Despite the loss of so many lives, many safety engineers who watched the towers fall remain astonished at how many people were able to escape in the hour and 45 minutes after the initial strike.

“I think what we’re seeing anecdotally is that the evacuation systems in those two buildings performed very well,” said Jake Pauls, an evacuation consultant.

This surprise success has implications for both tactics and building codes.

For one thing, it appears to prove the value of improvements in stairwell lighting, exit signs and disaster planning made by the World Trade Center as a result of the confused and sluggish evacuation after the 1993 bombing. This raises the question of whether similar reforms should be extended to all high-rise buildings.

Further, the rapid collapse of the buildings undermines evacuation procedures that assume there will never be a need to empty a high-rise quickly. Thanks to smoke detectors, sprinkler systems and aggressive fire suppression, most high-rise fires are extinguished without the need to empty more than a few floors.

Pauls, who gained his expertise planning for bomb attacks in Canada’s separatist violence, has long advocated the opposite approach--planning evacuations to get everyone out as fast as possible. Terrorists, he argues, wield more devastating weapons than fire.

Pauls sees his case being bolstered by the orderly flight of so many World Trade Center workers, perhaps spurred by memories of the 1993 bombing.

Office Workers Are Likely to Flee

Fire officials, on the other hand, defend partial evacuations for almost every high-rise fire. They say the practice keeps stairwells reasonably free for their own use and keeps people away from falling debris outside the building.

One consequence of the disaster may be greater reluctance of office workers to wait patiently in future emergencies.

“Now, I cannot imagine a voice announcement going out saying, ‘We’ve had an emergency and are evacuating levels 31-34. All others must wait for further instructions,’ ” said James Lathrop, president of Koffel Associates, a fire protection engineer. “Do you think they will await further instructions?”

Accounts of disabled workers trying to flee the World Trade Center left searing and perplexing evidence of oversights in policies.

Since the adoption of the Americans With Disabilities Act, requiring broadened access, the ranks of the disabled in tall office buildings have expanded. Provision for their safety has not.

Codes now require sheltered areas on each floor able to resist fire for an hour. The disabled are instructed to go there in an emergency and wait.

Harrowing accounts of people left behind to die, sometimes accompanied by others trying vainly to assist, demonstrated the problem with this strategy.

One idea--special chairs that allow an able-bodied person to lower a disabled person down a flight of stairs--is on the market. A firefighter was reported to have used one such chair in the World Trade Center to save a woman.

But the chairs can slow stairwell traffic and are not designed to travel dozens of floors, one manufacturer said.

Solutions to the questions raised by the World Trade Center collapse will eventually find their way into debates over building codes. For example, another inch or two of heat insulation on the towers’ steel beams might have held off the collapse for a few minutes, giving dozens or hundreds more people time to escape.

The tragedy appears certain to influence the debate over stairwells.

Giving a nod to the safety record of high-rise buildings, the Building Officials and Code Administrators, authors of one of the nation’s widely followed guides, recently approved a reduction in the standard width of stairwells. Over protests, the National Fire Protection Assn. is evaluating a recommendation to do the same in its Life Safety Code.

“My prediction is there’s a good chance they’re going to be pulling back on that,” said Robert Solomon, the association’s chief building fire protection engineer.

There are those who would like to require wider stairwells. Such proposals always involve a trade-off in cost. Building owners and trade groups often oppose such reforms.

A simpler idea is to limit building height.

Some, such as architect Charles Harper, find tall buildings too risky. Harper, chairman of the American Institute of Architecture’s disaster response team, has studied high structures after tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes. He says he’ll never spend time above the seventh floor of any building, the maximum height of a firetruck ladder.

USC professor William J. Petak, who has written books on disaster policy, thinks the World Trade Center concentrated too many people in a single place.

“We make ourselves more vulnerable when that building fails,” Petak said. “You made a big target and you made the target extraordinarily important.”

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Historic Fires and Reforms

History shows it takes a catastrophe to bring about fire-safety reforms:

The Great Chicago Fire, Oct. 8-10, 1871, 120 dead.

It wiped out the 3-square-mile core of the city, destroying 12,000 buildings and causing as much as $200 million in property damage. Chicago’s buildings, like most in American cities then, were made of wood.

Reform: The city was rebuilt with brick, stone and metal.

Iroquois Theatre, Chicago, Dec. 30, 1903, 602 dead.

Although considered fire resistant, the theater caught fire after an overheated spotlight ignited stage riggings. Members of the audience panicked and rushed for the exits, where they became entangled with firefighters.

Reform: Tougher safety standards were imposed for theaters and other public buildings, including fire-resistant curtains, clearly marked exits, alarm systems, fire extinguishers and standpipes.

Triangle Shirtwaist Co., New York, March 25, 1911, 146 dead.

This sweatshop in lower Manhattan, in which 500 immigrants worked on the eighth and ninth floors of a 10-story building, became an inferno when a rag bin caught fire. Exits were blocked, fire hoses were rotted and useless, and stairwells became impassable. Panicked factory workers, mostly young immigrant women, were blocked at an exit where the door opened inward.

Reform: A host of new codes were passed that became the foundation of new national standards later created by the National Fire Protection Assn.

Cocoanut Grove, Boston, Nov. 28, 1942, 491 dead.

A small fire in the basement lounge raced through the nightclub, where a crowd of 1,000 greatly exceeded the club’s capacity. Club goers fled to the main entrance, where they became jammed in a tight knot. About 200 people died from smoke, fire and trampling.

Reform: It prompted greater enforcement of occupancy limits and a requirement for more exits.

MGM Grand Hotel Fire, Las Vegas, Nov. 21, 1980, 85 dead.

The fire, caused by a short circuit, started in the wall and ceiling of a delicatessen and spread through the lobby and along plastic decor in the casino. Toxic fumes and dense smoke poured through the air-conditioning ducts and elevator shafts.

Reform: It prompted the state to require hotels taller than 55 feet to retrofit sprinkler systems. The state also required smoke detectors and exit maps in all rooms, limited use of combustible fiberboard and required smoke sensors in air-conditioning ducts so that the system would shut down in case of fire.

First Interstate Building, Los Angeles, May 4, 1988, one dead.

A fire in the 62-story building gutted four floors, injured 40 people and caused about $450 million in damage. The cause was never determined.

Reform: It prompted the city to require all commercial buildings over 75 feet to retrofit with sprinklers, install fire sensors every few floors and air-pressurization systems to fan smoke out of stairwells. It also led to firefighting improvements such as upgrades to the fire department’s radio system.

One Meridian Plaza, Philadelphia, Feb. 23, 1991, three firefighters dead.

The fire was started by spontaneous combustion among some oily rags on the 22nd floor of the 38-story building. It burned out of control for 19 hours, causing $100 million in damage. It spread through nine floors until it reached a floor where a sprinkler system that had been installed by a tenant extinguished it.

Reform: The fire spurred the city to enact a law requiring commercial high-rise buildings to be retrofitted with sprinkler systems. The law at the time only required sprinklers in new buildings.

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Compiled by John Tyrrell / Los Angeles Times