BE PREPARED
FIRE COMMENTARY
We stood in the basement Emergency Operations Center, taking in the steady stream of live news reports. Nearly 2,000 miles away, New York City firefighters were waging a battle of immense proportions: Dense smoke pushed from the basement entry to an underground garage. People poured out of towers, soot stains covering their faces. Firefighters took out ground-level windows with a roof ladder. Children were trapped in the building, their field trip gone awry.
What was the cause of the fire? W’as it a transformer? A gas explosion?
As the unedited images continued on the television screen, my mind drifted back to the spring of 1981: I was sitting in the back row of Professor Caulfield’s safety engineering course at John Jay College. As we waited for the class to begin, 1 talked to the deputy chief of Brooklyn’s tenth division, who was sitting next to me.
I posed a scenario to him: A multiple-alarm fire is being fought in midtown; numerous companies are committed A plane crashes into the World Trade Center, and you’re the first responding deputy chief.
“What do you do first, Ed? What alarm do you transmit? Where do you set up your command post? Where do you stage the companies? What special equipment do you call for?” 1 asked.
He responded matter-of-factlv. He laid out the probable strategy and identified the succession of tasks to be performed. He detailed the command structure. 1 was impressed.
I never considered a bomb, even as a worst-case scenario, when constructing the hypothetical scenario above.
But now, in 1993, the “unthinkable” has happened. Americans are worried that international terrorism is being waged in our country. We are worried that we no longer are secure from the zealots who have wreaked havoc on foreign soil.
How about the firefighters? How do they fit into the picture? Well, firefighters now must add international terrorism to their ever-expanding list of social ills to which they must respond. These social problems are reflected in the increasing numbers of unattended children who start fires, the fortress-like homes whose “security” bars trap and kill occupants when fire breaks out, and the growing threat of contracting AIDS from HIVpositive individuals.
What can firefighters do? Here are a few things to consider:
- Anticipate the possibility of a bomb when responding to a wellinvolved fire at a major facility or landmark. This is especially true for fires in underground or “public” areas. such as building lobbies.
- Learn from our firefighting counterparts across the Atlantic in Great Britain: Consider the possibility of
- secondary bombs, set to detonate after the arrival of emergency forces. If possible, stage units away from the scene until they are needed.
- Consider structural damage a primary threat to firefighter safety where a bomb may be involved; the threat here is even greater than in “normal” fires. The collapse of “massive” buildings is a real possibility.
- The destruction of all fire protection systems will leave building occupants on their own and you without many options. Who could have anticipated that an entire building would be evacuated with essentially no one in control?
- In the case of the World Trade Center, the “forced” smoke travel up 110 floors to the top of the building within minutes alerted all building occupants to a major problem. Many people waited for instructions that could not be transmitted because both alarms and the public address system were rendered inoperable by the blast. The only communications options available were through personal, portable radios and cellular phones.
- Overhaul will be complicated by the need to preserve explosives as evidence. Firefighters must be trained to know what to look for and preserve such physical evidence, just as they are trained to gather and preserve arson evidence.
- National organizations such as the International Association of FireChiefs must take a leading role in developing procedures to handle terrorist acts, similar to what has been done for civil disturbances. In addition. they should coordinate efforts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, To-
- bacco and Firearms to establish policies under which federal agencies will alert local fire officials to potential bomb incidents as the federal personnel are “tipped off.”
BUILDING CODES
How about the buildings? Although many of them are not designed with terrorist attacks in mind, the fact that fire/safety systems at the World Trade Center completely failed indicates that code improvements are necessary’, especially for large and significant buildings. These code changes could include the following:
- Requiring that battery-powered emergency lighting devices be provided instead of allowing emergency generators to supply power to lighting fixtures. Fouror six-hour operation—instead of the two-hour requirement now specified—should be required for large buildings.
- In the case of very tall buildings, emergency power generators should be placed at different, remote locations, to provide redundancy.
- Provide smoke barriers in floors and in vertical shafts.
- Provide radio-controlled public address and communication systems, in addition to or instead of hard-wired systems.
- Although sprinkler systems are no match for detonating explosive devices, upgrading the level of sprinkler protection in public areas of buildings that may be the target of arsonists should be considered.
- The summer 1983 issue of Factory Mutual’s Record magazine contained articles about high-rises, including the World Trade Center. The article’s final paragraph read: “No one can say disaster will never strike the World Trade Center. But with the dedication to safety that the Port Authority has shown in designing and maintaining the complex, one can say that its occupants are quite prepared to meet an emergency head-on.”
Evidently, the Port Authority wasn’t ready for all eventualities. Will we be?
