The Lesson of the Towering Inferno

Editor's note: The essay that follows represents the opinions of its author only. Gregory Gargiso wrote a letter to the editors of Architectural Record, and he was invited to expand on his thoughts for In the Cause of Architecture. His ideas have proven to be somewhat controversial and possibly impractical, but the perspective of a working New York City firefighter may open up new lines of discussion about building design and construction, and In the Cause of Architecture supports Lieutenant Gargiso's right to express his views. At the same time, we invite responses to his ideas from design and construction professionals or anyone with informed ideas on the subject.

Okay, where do we begin here? The editors of Architectural Record asked me to write a piece because of a letter I wrote through email about what I thought should be done with the World Trade Center site. It was an open forum where people were weighing in about whether it should be built, shouldn't be built; make it a park, et cetera, et cetera. I weighed in with my personal experience of the building. As a firefighter in downtown Manhattan, I had responded to calls at the buildings (WTC and others) numerous times, too numerous to count, even. Also, I wrote that for promotion purposes, the New York City Fire Department rigorously tests its members on the types of buildings to which they most respond and fight fires in, high-rise office buildings included.

Up until September 11, private dwelling fires were the ones that were most lethal every year. I am sure they will regain that terrible status again this year. I guess the editors were struck by a reference to a movie I'm sure we've all seen, The Towering Inferno, in which, at the end, the fire chief played by Steve McQueen meets with the architect played by William Holden and says something like, "Maybe now they (the financiers, architects, bureaucrats, you get the idea) will listen to what we (the fire service) have to say."

Now, I am not accusing the aforementioned groups of denying the public any safety they need and deserve. I will say because of money and politics (those being the biggest two) that fire concerns—or, better yet, how fire treats the elements of the building—are relegated to a low position on the laundry list of concerns when a "super" or a "jumbo" gets erected. I know the flak is coming; I can hear people screaming already: "We do, we do, we always pay attention to the fire code and the building code." Maybe that's where the problem lies: the code. No code written is sufficient for two jumbo jets flying into buildings. After all, most of the toughest building codes written were written in hindsight. Look up the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where more than 200 women died, stuck inside. Now exits can't be blocked. Or look at how the 1998 fire at the Vandalia Houses in Brooklyn that killed three firefighters changed local law. My question is: why must there always be such a high price paid to learn these lessons?

To try to talk to architects and or engineers about their level of expertise about building construction would be laughable, so I won't. We do study building construction for the fire service, all different types; brownstones, frames, private dwellings, tenements, factories, high-rises. Primarily, what our tactics will be in each type, because fire behaves differently in each and every one because of materials and construction practices used there. We learn the dangers commonly associated with different types. For example, in private houses, the biggest disadvantage from a firefighting viewpoint would be the open stairway, which allows heat, smoke and flame to travel up unimpeded to the upper floors, which are probably sleeping areas.

Society's answer to this has been the smoke detector. As a firefighter, I would be thinking of closing off the stairways at the top and or the bottom with doors and walls. In other words, closing off the stairway/chimney. Now to some of you architects or engineers out there, this may be rudimentary stuff (our manuals, that is) but any of the technical matter in them was gathered some years ago by firefighters and fire officers, basically blue-collars, high school educated people. But I see them as I see the whole NYC Fire Department: the best damn bunch of overcompensating, overachieving magnificent bastards there are in the civil service. So what do I know about highrises, you ask?

Well for starters, what's in our manuals. Our teachings on highrise structures go like this: • They are broken down into three major construction groups; lightweight, mediumweight and heavyweight and these designations coincide almost directly with groups according to years. • Almost all the heavyweights were built before 1945, the medium weights from '45 to '68 and the lightweights from '68 to present. • It's not too far a leap from this to deduce that your heavyweights are your Empire State, your Woolworth Building, your Equitable Insurance Building. 20 to 25 pounds per cubic foot. Limestone faced, heavy steel skeleton encased in concrete or block and tile. • Your lightweights are 8 to 10 lbs per cubic foot, and include of course the Trade Center, the World Financial Center, the JP Morgan building. The newest high-rises in town, basically. • The middleweights are a bit more elusive, maybe because this group to me are the least aesthetically pleasing. They are 10 to 20 pounds per cubic foot. The Pan Am Building (or Met Life as it is now), One Bankers Trust Plaza, The UN Building.

So guess which one the firefighters like to fight the fires in the most. Well, you guessed it, the heavyweights. Not because we're hopeless romantics in love with the architecture of the early 20th Century. Why then? Because they perform under stress. You see, we are interested in results. It's all fine and well that a particular partition is supposed last against a fire X amount of hours in a controlled laboratory test, or that a curtain wall is not supposed to allow fire to pass from one floor of a high-rise to the next. But in the organized chaos of firefighting, the knuckle dragging grunt work, the 100 or more variables thrown into the mix, the controlled yelling to orchestrate men into action against the Red Devil, the race against time, the sheer physical logistics they don't usually do what they were designed to do. Now in the case of the Trade Center, it did do what it was supposed to do: collapse pancake-style to avoid toppling and taking out the other 20 or 30 square blocks surrounding it.

This is all Monday morning quarterback stuff for us because we've never had a major unplanned collapse of a multi-story high-rise, and would not have planned for one either until now. Since they survived the blast in 1993, there is no way you could have convinced me and probably a lot of other people that the buildings were ever coming down. Traditionally we are all about saving lives first then property. We take it personally when we lose buildings, big time, to a fire.

Overachieving bastards that we are, individuals with in the Fire Department will probably start going out and identifying any remaining buildings built in the style of the WTC, and buildings that remain potential terrorist targets, and buildings in general that we stare at and say, "Gee, I hope I never get a fire in that building," because we know it will have its share of logistical nightmares. A few digital cameras and a few Power Point projectors and we'll do wonders. That's our end of it, "Be prepared." They aren't going to change the existing buildings out there. Hell, we knew in the Fire Service that we didn't like trusses before September 11, thanks to Vincent Dunn, who wrote Collapse of Burning Buildings : A Guide to Fireground Safety, among others, and Francis Brannigan, author of Building Construction for the Fire Service. We didn't know how extensive those trusses were in the Trade Center, and it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

You see, to us there were possibly 50,000 people in need of rescue and we had a job to do. Engineers love trusses. Load-carrying ability ratio to their relative weight is fantastic. They're relatively inexpensive, span greater distancesÉ what's not to like? How about no fire resistive rating? That's right none, zero, bupkus. Spray on fireproofing, you say? You mean the stuff that looks like popcorn made of mineral fiber? Or in the case of the Trade Center, asbestos that flakes off with your fingers? Maybe in a regular office fire, but not in an explosion or being hit with a Boeing 767. No way was that stuff staying on. Look, I've seen an 18 inch I-beam with spray-on fireproofing in an acetylene-fueled fire and metal bar joists with the same in an ordinary office fire. I know which one I would rather hang around under.

Oversimplifying again, the way we understand it right now is that fire resistance is directly a function of the mass of the components of the building. The more mass, the more fire resistance. The heavier the weight, the better. Another dilemma. See, the Empire State Building has survived numerous fires and even had a plane—a smaller one than a 767—crash into it without terrible structural damage, while in 30 years the Trade Center had no major fire whatsoever. Now, the Fire Safety wasn't vastly superior at the WTC, so what gives? Maybe the prescence of sprinklers in one and not the other? Sprinklers are the best defense we have right now against fire. The large-scale devastation of September 11 relagates sprinklers to little importance.

Technology employed in the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where a central core of high strength concrete is employed as "spine," protecting the elevators, stairs, utilities and other vitals is a step in the right direction. Stairwells protected by concrete and steel instead of sheetrock would have resulted in lower casualities at the WTC. Walls were obliterated and doorjambs jammed as the building settled into its death throes, barring escape for many. What if power remained on and the elevators stayed operational?

Highrise buildings in New York built between 1945 and 1968 were required to have a "fire tower," a stair in a shaft open at top and separated from the floor space by a vestibule with two doors at each end. This is a tremendous advantage to fleeing occupants psychologically(fresh air) as well as physically. The problem for the Fire Service is identifying these stairwells and using them for evacuation only. You see, we can't use these for stretching the primary attack hose line, because once we open all the doors, we have just completed the giant chimney and were stuck in it like errant raccoons who wandered into a residential fireplace chimney. Most stairwells that aren't of the Fire tower type are pressurized to limit smoke and heat travel.

So we've got sprinklers, dedicated evacuation stairs, elevators, all protected from the effects of anything short of nuclear blast. Also, we left out fire loads. When engineers figure out a building's stresses, wind load, floor load, dead load, impact load, live loads, static loads is fire figured in?

Space age materials? New technologies? Bring it on. We're not Luddites in the Fire service. Bring them on, but on one condition, let us set the fire to test them, or better yet the NFPA, using previous horrible fires and all their variables to set the test parameters.

I mean, if we are going to design all these specs for safety and then load the building with plastics and its derivatives—basically long-chain hydrocarbons a few C's or H's in their molecular structure short of being gasoline—then we might as well forget it.