Fire Safety Officials Push For Building Code Revisions
Tuesday January 14, 2003
Fire officials met in Manhattan Monday to work on
an update to the city's 30-year-old building code to make
high-rises safer.
Legislation expected to go before the City Council
within the next six months includes new structural mandates and
safety requirements to prevent fires and collapses and to
facilitate evacuations and firefighting. Fire safety directors
and safety advocates met at the New York City Fire Museum in
TriBeCa to push for the changes in light of the World Trade
Center attack.
The revisions would lessen the possibility of a
complete pancake collapse like the ones that brought the twin
towers straight down, the advocates said. They also want annual
evacuation drills conducted in every high-rise in the city once a
year; on-site information cards for firefighters that indicate
each building's layout and what flammable substances may be
stored there; and sprinklers installed in every building.
"We know sprinklers work," said FDNY Battalion
Chief Pat Savage. "They work 99 percent of the time. If you had
sprinklers in every building, we wouldn't have a major fire. They
do work."
Property owners have fought such calls before,
saying it would be too expensive to install sprinklers in
buildings that don't already have them.
"I know the resistance that comes," said Captain
John Dunne of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, "but I
also know that buildings are being constructed in New York City
that are beyond our capability to extinguish fires in them. I
believe the building owners owe a responsibility to us as
firefighters, the civilians who visit those buildings, the people
who work there and the people who live there to make them fire
safe."
The officials and advocates also discussed an
upgrade to the Fire Department's radio system, which, they said,
was moving too slowly. Within a month, the department should have
working radios that enable firefighters to communicate throughout
an entire high-rise, but the capability to talk with police and
other emergency personnel is still another year away, one
official said.
"God forbid something like 9/11 happens again
tomorrow," said Sally Regenhard of the Skycraper Safety
Commission, an advocacy group formed by relatives of World Trade
Center victims. "We're no better prepared as far as radios. The
New York City Fire Department has to bring itself into the 21st
century. They're not. They're way behind the times. They're
technology is dinosaur-like."
The current analog radios have been blamed by
some, in part, for the deaths of some firefighters in the World
Trade Center who may not have received orders from their
superiors to evacuate and could not have heard a warning of
imminent collapse from an NYPD helicopter. The new digital radios
were originally introduced in March of 2001 but were quickly
pulled from service after reception problems.
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source: http://www.ny1.com/
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