Starkey - The Overview Draft

Glenn Corbett was driving north on the New Jersey turnpike just before 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.
A professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, Corbett was taking his normal route toward the park-and-ride in North Bergen, N.J., to catch a Manhattan-bound bus when he saw smoke billowing from a building Downtown. The A.M. radio station Corbett checked for news was ominously silent. Once parked, Corbett boarded the bus and traveled about a mile east before the bus was stopped by officers blocking the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Another park-and-ride bus had just made it through to New Jersey. Then, no traffic was allowed in or out of Manhattan. The city had been cordoned off by the officers. Corbett boarded the outbound bus that had stopped to pick up passengers, knowing nothing except that there was a major fire Downtown.
"I just went back to my firehouse because I didn't know what we would be doing," said Corbett, also a volunteer firefighter in Waldwick, N.J. "We really essentially didn't do much. Some of the firefighters knew it immediately it was a terrorist attack. I didn't know it at the time"
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In 1962, the Port of New York Authority awarded a contract to Yamasaki and Associates, a Troy, Mich.-based architectural firm led by Monoru Yamasaki, to design the World Trade Center. The centerpiece of the design would be two towers, envisioned as the flagship buildings of Lower Manhattan and, at 110 stories and 1,350 feet tall each, the tallest buildings in the world, two monuments to American extravagance.
In 1966, officials broke ground at the site. Construction would begin in 1968. On Dec. 6, 1968, New York City adopted new building codes that relaxed building codes related, among other regulations, to stairwells and fireproofing, some of which had been in place since the adoption of codes adopted after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village. Locked doors, a lack of stairwells, faulty fire escapes and doors that opened in instead of out had trapped factory workers in the building, leading many to leap to their deaths below and many others to be trapped and burned to death. Others died from after a fire escape collapsed. In all, 146 factory workers died. The fire led to the first movement to make high-rise buildings safer, not just in New York City, but countrywide. Buildings with more than 2,500 square feet were required to have two staircases, for example, under the new codes. Another staircase was required for each additional floor of 5,000 square feet.
But by 1968, more than a half a century had passed, and building Manhattan buildings had become a particularly expensive business venture. "Less restrictive" is how a government report issued in September of 2005 described the 1968 codes, which were written to ease the costs of building Manhattan high-rises. Beyond that, commercial rents had been surging in New York. The loss of even a hundred square feet could mean the loss of thousands in annual rent in a high-rise office building. So developers, considering the codes antiquated, petitioned New York City to relax the codes which they believed, according the National Institute and Standards Technology report, had not been revised to reflect technological advances. "The developers were arguing you were building bunkers and you've got way more safety than you need and its driving up costs," said Gregory Stein, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and native of Long Island who recently studied the codes for a review published in November of last year. "They may have been right."
The answers included changing requirements for stairwells, requiring only three stairwells instead of six in New York buildings 10 stories and taller. Fire towers, stairwells with additional protection, were no longer required. Doors leading to stairwells were reduced in size to 36 inches, instead of 48 inches in the code that had been comprehensively revised last in 1938. Stairwell width requirements were 44 inches, 22 inches "per unit," unit meaning person, according to the code. Fireproofing standards were relaxed and spray-on fireproofing was allowed. Structural columns were only required to last 3 hours instead of 4 hours, and floor framing, 2 hours instead of 3 hours. Under normal circumstances in the city, though, the new code would not have affected the building for World Trade Center. Its plans had been submitted, and construction had begun, before the codes were adopted on Dec. 6. But the land was owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which existed outside the jurisdiction of the city and the state. Officials there, recognizing the "less restrictive" requirements in the 1968 code, told its consultants to make that basis for the safety of the new World Trade Center towers.
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Before reaching his firehouse in Waldwick on the morning of Sept. 11, Corbett put in a call to his colleagues at Fire Engineering Magazine, a 128-year-old monthly trade journal where he served, and continues to serve, as technical editor. He still did not know what had occurred but, whatever it was, there was a spectacular fire in Manhattan . "I knew this was a very large incident that this was going to be one of historic proportions," Corbett said. "I thought, 'The magazine needs to go over there."
At 8:48 a.m., a Boeing 767 – American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston destined for Los Angeles – had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. When another jet - United Airlines Flight 175 with the same departure point and destination – crashed into the south tower 18 minutes later, a theory that terrorists had attacked New York City became reality. Tragedy played out for most Americans, including Corbett, on network news stations. Workers leaped from windows to escape the fire, and death by entrapment. Horrified onlookers screamed on the street below and told of the horror on network interviews. At 9:50 a.m., the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, like its feet had been swept out from under it. Networks broadcast the collapse. Thirty-nine minutes later, the north tower came down in a sea of ash that spread like a wave through Lower Manhattan, blanketing it in soot. Countless were dead, to be sure. Others were trapped. Firefighters who had entered the burning building to save those inside were among them. That was obvious from just watching.
Ultimately, almost 3,000 people were killed, including 343 firefighters and paramedics and 60 police officers.
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The Twin Towers had stood for 22 and 23 years, respectively, on the morning of September 11, 2001. A report issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in September of 2005 told of how the fireproofing had been knocked off of the steel foundation when the jets crashed into both buildings and the fire, fueled by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, caused the floors to sag. Even before the buildings fell, the crash, plus falling debris, had either destructed or blocked five of the six stairwells in the buildings. The NIST report said that the separation of the stairwells reduced their ability to evacuate people on higher floors because of the visibility loss related to fire. Deaths were lessened only, the NIST report noted, because the buildings were only one-third to one-half full at the time of the attacks. If the towers had been full, 40,000 people would have been spread throughout both buildings, and up to 14,000 would have been killed. It would have taken three hours to evacuate everyone from the buildings, even without the stairwells destroyed. Of the about 17,400 people spread throughout the buildings at the time of the attack, 87 percent survived, according to the report. Many of the survivors interviewed by NIST investigators cited previous evacuation drills as helpful. Most who survived were below the crash sites at the time of the attacks escaped. Most who were above the crash sites – workers, diners at Windows on the World on floors 106 and 107 of the north tower – were trapped and perished.
Many remain convinced that stricter standards for stairwells and fireproofing could have saved lives. Still others say that preventing an attack of such proportions may be impossible. David A. Lucht, an engineer, was the director of Fire Safety Studies at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts at the time of the attacks. He is now retired. Lucht said most buildings cannot be protected against jets, especially those bound for cross-country trips full of fuel.
"If it weren't for the building being impacted by an airplane, I can't imagine a fire that would have taken it down," Lucht said. "I can't imagine anyone designing a building that would withstand against that. You'd have to stop building them that tall.”
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Corbett said it was a “few weeks” after the attacks on September 11 when he understood the need for an investigation of the collapses. “With the large number of firefighter fatalities, we needed to understand how that happened.”
Just days into October, 2001, Corbett was in his office at John Jay in Manhattan when he received a call from Joe Calderone, the Daily News' chief of investigations. Calderone later wrote an article titled "2 Seek Probe of Collapse," which the Daily News published on Oct. 30. Corbett and Charles Jennings, another professor at John Jay, were the first to call for a private investigation of the collapse. "There are fundamental building and fire safety issues" that need to be investigated, Corbett told the Daily News. "This cuts to the heart of the way buildings are built and how we evacuate them."
Shortly after the article was published in the Daily News, a woman named Sally Regenhard called Corbett, asking for his consultation. Regenhard's son, Christian Michael Otto Regenhard, a 28-year-old probationary firefighter, was, and remains, missing at the site of the World Trade Center along with the entire Engine Company 279, of which he was a member. With Corbett as one of the lead consultants, Sally would soon form The Skyscraper Safety Campaign. The campaign’s goals were to initiate a subpoena-powered investigation; encourage stricter code compliance in the city and nationwide; ensure to ensure the safe development of land owned by the Port Authority; and educate those who create code by bringing more fire professionals in on the process. Some progress has been made, Corbett and Regenhard say, especially on the first two goals, but not as much as they would like. Both supported the bill that prompted the NIST investigation of the trade center collapse and continue to call for safer regulations and speak out against a hasty clean-up effort that resulted in the disposal that steel that Corbett says could have helped in a physical investigation. Corbett does point to The National Fire Protection Association’s adoption of a regulation that calls for 56 inch stairwells, a foot wider than the 44 inches required on September 11. But many of NIST's 26 requirements have not been acted upon.

Glenn Corbett, fire science professor at John Jay College
David Lucht, former director of fire safety studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Gregory Stein, law professor at University of Tennessee
NIST World Trade Center Report (Sept. 2005, wtc.nist.gov)
Daily News, “2 Seek Probe of Collapse,” Oct. 30, 2001
The Triangle Factory Fire, http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/
“Doomed to Repeat History,” Gregory Stein (November 2007, ssrn.com/abstract=964043)
The New York Times, “US Attacked,” September 12, 2001, By Serge Schmemann