Draft copy format

Here's a good model for the draft copy format of your project story that I want to see in the revised version we'll work on Friday. Note that it includes a list of sources at the end. Put your byline in and a working title.

Andrea Galyean – Investigations in Depth
Professor Jan Barry
News Story – 4/13/08 - stairs

TALL BUILDINGS, SKINNY STAIRS?

How wide are you?
I just the measured the widest part of me (my shoulders) and I’m 16 inches across. Add a couple inches on each side for normal sway, and I need at least 20 inches of width to walk down an office hallway or stairwell. But I’m a good bit smaller than the average Manhattan office worker. In fact, a salesman at the Wall Street location of the popular Men’s Wearhouse stores reports that the shoulders on the most commonly sold suit size in his shop (a 48) are 23 inches across when filled out by an actual person.
So if this suit-wearing average guy and I wanted to walk down a stairwell at the same time – if there was a fire in a high-rise, for instance, and we were trying to get out – we’d need 47 stairwell inches. Two people closer to his size would need 54 inches. But what if, instead of people filing downstairs side-by-side, there were firefighters coming up at the same time? Firefighters wear big suits and carry a lot of gear, so they take up more room. How wide would that stairwell need to be?
The current New York City building code for office buildings – in place since 1968 - requires that most stairwells in commercial high-rises be 44 inches wide. That assumes two lanes of traffic using 22 inches each. But does it work that way in reality?
The largest building evacuation in New York City was when 15,400 people escaped from the World Trade Center (WTC) towers after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. That event demonstrated how the assumptions of the building codes translated into real-life.
John Labriola, a WTC survivor who used the stairs to escape from the 71st floor of the north tower, contributed his recollections of that day to the Smithsonian Museum’s 2002 exhibit, September 11: Bearing Witness to History. “We walked down two by two,” Labriola said in his statement. “Whenever necessary we would press ourselves into a single file line to let [injured] people get by… Around the 35th floor we started meeting a steady stream of firefighters walking up and had to press into single file again.”
Labriola also took photographs during the evacuation. One of the most famous, taken within the stairwell, shows civilians flattened against the wall as firefighters pass. The stairwells in the north tower were 44 inches wide.
Glenn Corbett, a fire sciences professor at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a consultant to the New York Department of Buildings Committee that proposed post-WTC changes to the city’s building code, thought the message was clear. "Out of all the issues, one of the no-brainers was the issue of stairway width," said Corbett. He refers to Labriola’s images as evidence; "If you look at those photos, with firefighters coming up and civilians coming down, the people have to turn sideways."
The 44-inch standard was developed by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in 1927 and was based on the width of the average U.S. World War I soldier’s shoulders – a bit under 22 inches – and the idea that building evacuations would be orderly events with everyone marching in neat rows. But Corbett and other fire safety experts say that the WTC evacuation proved that the measurement isn’t wide enough. “Even if the standards ever were adequate, people have changed since then,” said Corbett.
U.S. Department of Health reports back Corbett up. Over the past few decades, Americans have grown significantly heavier. Now the average man is over 5’9” and 190 pounds – and gaining. In addition to being wider, most people are also less physically fit, which means that they tire more quickly when walking down several dozen flights of stairs. If the stairwell isn’t wide enough to pass, said Corbett, “then you’re only as fast as the slowest person ahead of you.”
Concerned about larger, slower people and the congestion caused by incoming firefighters – called counterflow - Jake Pauls, an internationally recognized fire safety specialist from Silver Springs, Maryland, has been lobbying for wider stairs in high-rises. After years of research – including scrutiny of the WTC evacuations, Pauls concluded that the speed of building evacuation “varies directly—and linearly” with the width of a stairwell. In a 2005 report, Pauls said that “the traditional [44-in.] nominal minimum width for exit stairs was flawed, and known to be flawed a few decades ago.”
Based on his studies, Pauls proposed that the NFPA change its requirements for exit stairs in high-rise buildings to a minimum 56-inch width. As Corbett explained, "56 inches gives you the ability for counterflow, the ability for people to pass. It's an obvious solution. Any four-year-old can figure that out."
The NFPA incorporated Pauls’s recommendations into its 2006 Life Safety Code, but the code is only a guideline and does not have any legal mandate. Since the new measurements were announced, they have been opposed by major real estate development groups, such as the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and the federal General Services Administration (GSA) due to concerns over construction costs and lost rental income.
During recent task force hearings on updating New York City building codes, the Real Estate Board of New York joined BOMA and the GSA to argue against adopting the new NFPA recommendations. Patricia Lancaster, the city’s Building Commissioner, explained the developers’ position in a Sept. 9, 2006 article in the New York Times: “If you increase a stairwell by one inch at the top of a 90-story building, you are giving up dozens and dozens of square feet of rentable space."
The 2008 New York City Building Codes will go into effect on July 1. The required minimum width for exit stairwells will be: 44 inches.

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Sources named: - Glenn Corbett: c: 201-993-2814; gcorbett1@ix.network.com- Jake Pauls: w: 301-933-5275; bldguse@aol.com
- Ray (last name withheld), Men’s Wearhouse Wall Street: w: 212-233-0675

Articles cited:
- New York Times, “9/11 Has Spurred Only Modest Changes in New York City and National Building Codes,” by Sewell Chan, September 6, 2006
- “Minimum Stair Width for Evacuation, Overtaking Movement and Counterflow Technical Bases and Suggestions for the Past, Present and Future,” by Jake L. Pauls, John J. Fruin, and Jeffrey M. Zupan, June 2005
- 2008 New York City Building Codes, Chapter 10, “Means of Egress”
- “Statement from John Labriola, World Trade Center, September 11, 2001,” by John Labriola, courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, September 2002

Web sites consulted:
- http://www.boma.org
- http://www.nist.gov
- http://www.nfpa.org
- http://www.cdc.gov/nchs
- http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection
- http://www.iccsafe.org
- http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob