Chad's final-stages rough draft

Bank of America Picks up Department of Buildings’ Slack [WORKING TITLE]

By Chad Smith

For the past five years, the New York City Department of Buildings has continually updated and revised its laws on skyscrapers, driven partly by lessons learned on safety after 9/11.

And each year, it has had a chance to make two revisions, which many firefighters, architects, professors, 9/11 survivors and engineers have long said could save more lives in a skyscraper catastrophe: wider staircases and more sets of them.

Each year, on the issue, the Buildings Department has done nothing.

“Wider staircases can mean the difference between life or death," according to Vincent Dunn, a retired, 42-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department. "These are people's lives, and you have a Department of Buildings interested in doing frills."

Over a dozen calls were put in to the Department of Buildings on the staircase issue over the last two weeks; spokespeople there promised to get back with answers. As of Friday, the department hasn’t returned a single call.

Walk into almost any skyscraper in this city and the staircases will be 44 inches wide, with three sets of major staircases. Experts say this width and this number of staircases don’t offer enough room for the quick, efficient evacuation of thousands of tenants — when seconds are crucial — and cite much of what was learned in September 11th’s aftermath.

New laws on the issue haven’t been passed, the Buildings Department has said, because the department can’t gain “consensus” on the issue from those representing owners and developers, who stand to lose money on potential real-estate space if staircases are given more prominence.

But one building owner, Bank of America, and its developer, the Durst Organization, are doing things differently. They are taking the lead on staircase safety, surpassing city codes and forgoing the profit that could be made if they simply built to code.

Bank of America’s new 54-story headquarters near Bryant Park will have an ideal staircase when it comes to safety, many experts believe.

Larry Grayson, a Bank of America spokesman, said his company had employees who died and survived 9/11 in mind when the bank decided to build the building and staircases this way.

One of those employees might have been Chris O’Driscoll, a former high level Bank of America manager who was on the 82nd floor of the north tower when the first plane hit. O’Driscoll escaped that day and in an e-mail message had this to say about wider staircases and his ordeal:

“If you wanted to evacuate a 100-plus story building in a hurry, then two abreast” — which is barely what 44 inches affords — “is not going to be sufficient. I believe if we had been aware of the possibility that the [north tower] was going to collapse, it would have been much more difficult to escape within the confined space of the staircase. Any additional space would assist in the evacuation of a tall building.”

The staircases at the new Bank of America headquarters will be 66 inches wide, or 33% wider than what the city code requires, according to Jordan Barowitz, director of external affairs at the Durst Organization, the building’s developer.

According to experts, that’s enough room for three people to descend comfortably side by side and provides enough room for “counterflow.” An ideal example of this concept is one in which firefighters can efficiently move up the staircase with heavy equipment as tenants fleeing walk down. This way, tenants won’t be forced into a slow, single file as they were in the twin towers on 9/11 when firefighters, understandably, began taking up much of the room in the 44-, and some cases, 56- [OR 54? TK], inch staircases.

Bank of America’s staircases will be encased by two and a half feet of steel reinforced concrete walls. After 9/11 the Buildings Department did mandate stronger materials be used for the encasing of new city skyscrapers' staircases. (The twin towers’ were made of lightweight gypsum board and didn’t stand a chance on impact.)

Dunn, the retired fire chief, said that there’s no higher standard than steel reinforced concrete. He called Bank of America and Durst’s choice “impressive.”

The reinforced staircase will be located at the building’s center, its “core,” according to Barowitz. The core is one of the strongest parts of the building, meant to better preserve life-saving infrastructure, like the staircases, in case of disaster. It’s a reaction to what happened on 9/11, Barowitz said.

“Our staircases in the core will be able to withstand a massive impact,” he said.

Furthermore, the Bank of America staircases will be air pressurized, which means that if heavy smoke is circulating on a particular skyscraper’s floor it won’t get trapped in the staircases when a person opens the staircase door to escape. The air in the staircase is maintained at a higher pressure than general floor’s and will, essentially, push the smoke out of the staircase when its door opens. [REWRITE]

Air pressurized stairs are not required by the city’s building code.

Barowitz said there will also be “safe havens” in the staircases. That is, at each floor, there will be an extra large landing. Disabled people or those who need to rest can take breaks as they evacuate while not holding anyone else up.

This extra measure is crucial, according to Glenn Corbett, professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“You need a place to attend to someone who can’t egress as quick,” Corbett said. “It’s not fair for one person to put others in the worst kind of danger when it can be avoided.”

Asked how many separate sets of staircases there will be at the Bank of America tower, Barowitz didn’t have an exact number. He said there will be “many, many sets of staircases. The number exceeds what’s required, I can tell you that.”

Bank of America and the Durst Organization wouldn’t say how much money they could have made if the space devoted to more staircases was used for rentable space. Grayson did say this:

“One of our core values at Bank of America is ‘Do the right thing.’ The value of square footage potentially devoted to rentable space was far outweighed by the added safety afforded by the staircases designed wider than code requirements.”

With many voices lined up for wider staircases, it may be hard for some to imagine why they haven’t been mandated in this city. But there are reasons, and those opposing wider staircases may not be as devious as one might want to believe.

The counter belief to wider staircases and more of them [CLEAN] is a fire-fighting strategy called “defend in place,” which essentially means, "if there’s an emergency, stay put.” If there’s a fire on the fifth floor of a skyscraper, tenants on 25 need not evacuate and potentially expose themselves to unnecessary risk, like, being trampled, let’s say, as they evacuate.

Accordingly, many of the buildings in New York City were built to contain fires to a single floor. The staircases were not meant to accommodate a large percentage of the building’s population, as they were forced to do September 11.

"If you have a building filled with 50,000 people, I don't care how wide your stairways are or if you have two or three major staircases,” said Ron Burton, vice president of codes, standards and regulatory affairs at Building Owners and Managers Association International. “It’s going to take a heck of a long time to get everyone out. We still, as we always have, believe in defend in place.”

Burton’s organization, which represents thousands of building owners, has been pointedly criticized in the past by fire safety experts, and has been accused of standing in the way of wider staircases.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say we’re ‘standing in the way of wider staircases,’” he said. “This is an ongoing, complex issue, and we’re all still exploring it. Obviously, we care about people’s safety or we wouldn’t be in this business.”

Still, Burton said, his building managers association believes that 44 inches is wide enough. His organization also believes that three staircases in skyscrapers are adequate, that every person shouldn’t be in those stairways anyway, because, again, of the defend-in-place strategies.

Dunn disagreed.

"Stair design and capacity still is based on the [belief]…that fire will be confined to one floor; therefore, stairs need not have to have capacity to hold all the people of the building," Dunn said.

"Stairs are designed to allow only a limited number of people to leave a building. Remember the Titanic and the limited number of lifeboats? The rest must stay in place during the fire….Defend in place is based on the building being fire resistive [proof], which many in the fire service believe is no longer true."

Burton said that the only way his association would change its beliefs is if there were "cross-benefit analysis" — authoritative sources and many of them — proving that wider staircases and more sets of them are worth the extra financial and structural burden and make skyscrapers safer, which he is yet to see.

Dunn said that it’s about more than such analysis and the laws, “The current New York City codes are just the letter of the law. Not the spirit.”

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