Galyean - progress 2 - quotes

Choice quotes (several others in last memo, these are new only):

1- Frederic Schwarz, architect
"You've got to start with this: it's about people trying to get out and they can't get out."

"Buildings aren't designed for planes to fly into them, but the safety standards should be."

"Why build one less stairwell for X amount of extra feet? Why build 44-inch wide stairwells? Why not 66-inches? Why do you have to have 40,000 square feet instead of 38,000?"
"There's nothing preventing wider stairs and concrete stairs, except money."

"Everything that costs more money, most developers don't want to do and so they have a developer's association."

"Developers want to do the right things, but only to a point."

Q: Have you proposed wider stairwells in any of your designs?
"Forget it. That's not even a conversation. You're fighting for every inch."

NOTE: Extra few inches could cause more problems due to perception that more than 2 people could pass at a time.


2 - Glenn Corbett, professor of Fire Sciences at John Jay College and consultant to Skyscraper Safety Campaign
"I've never known the Port Authority to be interested in anyone's safety."

"Out of all the issues, one of the no-brainers, we thought, was the issue of stairway width."
"If you look at those photos, with firefighters coming up and civilians coming down, the people have to turn sideways. 55 inches gives you the ability for counter-flow, the ability for people to pass them.
"So, Jake [Pauls, fire safety consultant] goes to the NFPA, puts in a provision to put 55-inch stairwells in all high rise buildings. It's an obvious solution - a no-brainer. Any four-year-old can figure that out.
"Two organizations - BOMA [Building Owners and Managers Association] and GSA [General Services Administration] - knock it down. Every inch of stairwell is less rentable space."

RE: building to code
"I'm a belts and suspenders kind of guy. When you get these unusual projects, exceptionally tall projects, I think you need to do a bit more than minimum code."


2 - Sally Regenhard, founder of Skyscraper Safety Campaign
"They were death traps. After these twin towers collapsed like a house of cards, like something in the Third World, not one person was questioning: "How could this happen?"
"This is supposedly the greatest city in the world; supposedly the greatest country in the world. And no one was asking questions."

"Everything that failed in 1993 - the fire department radios, the police and fire not working together - nothing was done and here we have 2001."

"We want to talk about failures so we can prevent this happening again."

RE: attempts to work with Dept. of Buildings and Port Authority
"We met a brick wall."
"We were blocked every step of the way."
"They want to go back to business, go back to making money."

4 - John Labriola - WTC survivor from 71st floor of the North Building
RE: evacuation through stairwell.
"One of the stairwells smelled strongly of smoke. The other seemed okay and we joined a group of others already beginning the walk down... We walked down two by two stopping every so often for some unknown reason. Whenever necessary we would press ourselves into a single file line to let people get by. It was pretty hot; people were slipping on the sweat of the people who had come before them. In some places the smoke was worse than others. Thank god the lights always stayed on."

"Around the 35th floor we started meeting a steady stream of firefighters walking up and had to press into single file again. None of them said a word as they went up and past us carrying unbelievable loads of equipment. They were already exhausted by the time we started seeing them."

"A few floors lower water was flowing creating rapids down the stairs. This got worse as we got lower down. The stairwell led down to an outside door lined with emergency workers urging us to move to safety. There was debris and broken glass everywhere. The courtyard where this outdoor landing led us onto must have been blocked or too dangerous for us to cross because we were directed back into that second floor balcony again and down two escalators into the mall under Tower 1."

5 - Steve Scotford, Bluerock Real Estate, LLC
"Of course fire safety and evacuation matter to developers. We talk about it all the time. Every week, I'm at meetings [with engineers] about these things."

6 - Ron Burton, VP for Advocacy & Research, BOMA International
"We want to find ways to provide safety in a cost effective manner."
"Building design is a difficult balance of life-safety, energy conservation, environmental sensitivity, and tenant satisfaction."

7 - James Lee Witt, CEO International Code Council
"Historically, major advances in building safety and fire prevention codes have been the result of lessons learned from past events," said Witt. "While no code can eliminate all risks, what we learn from the past does save lives and better protect property in the future."
(quoted in 2005 regarding possible changes to the ICC building codes based on NIST recommendations)

GENERAL PROGRESS:
I've been outlining the story, which will use the specific example of the stairwells to illustrate the resistance that the real estate development community and Port Authority have shown to adopting the safety recommendations of the 1995 and 2005 WTC reports. I've located transcripts of a 2005 NIST conference that was intended to help developers comply with the recommendations included in the report. My next calls are to a couple more developers, Dept. of Buildings and Port Authority for their side of the story.