Archives for the month of: January, 2007

High-rise Evacuation Methods

January 25, 07 //
5

There was an A&E doc­u­men­tary on the World Trade Cen­ter the other night, dis­cussing – as well as crit­i­ciz­ing – the early plan­ning phases and con­struc­tion of the WTC.

It also focused some­what on the short­com­ings of the WTC, such as stair­wells hug­ging the core of the build­ing pro­vid­ing what they thought was extra sta­bil­ity, that led to so many civil­ian casu­al­ties dur­ing the 2001 attacks.

There was obvi­ous con­cern over the meth­ods used for high-rise build­ing evac­u­a­tion. In most cases stair­ways are used, pro­vided that they are in work­ing con­di­tion. The planes that struck the WTC build­ings destroyed a large por­tion of the stairs which in turn con­tributed to the lack of proper evacuation.

As I watch­ing this, I was think­ing about bet­ter ways for effi­cient and safe evac­u­a­tion dur­ing high-rise build­ing emer­gen­cies. One solu­tion (not nec­es­sary fail­safe) that occurred to me was an enclosed slide that essen­tially loops around the build­ing. The slide itself would be oiled so that when groups of indi­vid­u­als are prepar­ing to evac­u­ate, they descend in such a man­ner where clog­ging of the slide would be prevented.

Again, not a fail­safe method of course, but I believe one that doesn’t rely on the short­com­ings that occur with stair­ways. If you’ve ever used the stairs in a high-rise build­ing you know that this isn’t an effi­cient means of get­ting peo­ple out of the build­ing in a timely fash­ion, espe­cially dur­ing an emer­gency when peo­ple typ­i­cally lose the abil­ity to think sensibly.

Yet, when I was think­ing about this I real­ized that using a slide could also lead to over­sights in the process of evac­u­a­tion. It’s pos­si­ble that like the stairs in the WTC build­ing, a por­tion of the slide could also be destroyed. That said, it’s dif­fi­cult to try and come up with var­i­ous ways to effi­ciently trans­port peo­ple out of a build­ing and at the same time mak­ing sure the means of doing so are safe and expedient.

There are other meth­ods such as zip lines (think James Bond or the mil­i­tary), extend­able slides and chute sys­tems that could work but again, which of these would actu­ally work when the real thing occurs, as opposed to just test­ing them in labs.

I per­son­ally don’t think we’ve found a per­fect sys­tem yet, despite how much tech­nol­ogy has improved in the past 20 years, and I don’t feel like we ever will.

What should be stressed how­ever is that we need to have alter­nate ways of evac­u­at­ing peo­ple from struc­tures to pre­vent mas­sive casu­al­ties when an emer­gency occurs.

Reflecting on 2006

January 3, 07 //
10

I’ve noticed that web folks are dili­gently recap­ping the events that occurred to them in the year 2006.

Always will­ing to fol­low suit when it comes to tra­di­tion, it’s no sur­prise to me that last year was one of the more plen­ti­ful years in my life­time. There were many expe­ri­ences that I’ll cher­ish for a life­time and those can be attrib­uted in most cases to the friends that I met for the first time (in per­son, and not through a com­puter screen) at SXSW.

Bear with me, as I’ve got a plethora of info to cover, but also know that while it’s inten­tion­ally “wordy” it’s also pretty mean­ing­ful to me.

To recap:

  • My son, Quinn Har­ri­son, was born Feb­ru­ary 9th, 2006. I remem­ber receiv­ing the call while I was at work from my father-in-law inform­ing me that I needed to make a mad dash to the hos­pi­tal. He didn’t use “mad” or “dash”, but I cer­tainly didn’t need any more con­vinc­ing. Quinn is a joy to have around – as is our daugh­ter Zoe – and while they drive us a bit batty some­times, it’s worth it.
  • I also tran­si­tioned to a new job with new hours, after being let go from a job I held for close to 3 years. It wasn’t the eas­i­est move to make, but turned out just fine in the end. If any­thing, it allowed me to spend more time with my kids and that to me is more impor­tant than anything.
  • Going to SXSW ’06 was a treat for sure. Meet­ing many tal­ented, funny and down to earth peo­ple made me real­ize that deep down we’re all in the same boat. Hon­or­able men­tions, or shout outs, go to Jonathan Snook, Dave Seah, Eric Shep­herd, Robert ‘The Swede’ Nyman (who car­ried on the tra­di­tion of call­ing me ‘Sagen’, passed down many gen­er­a­tions no thanks to the US mil­i­tary), Nathan Smith, Joshua Lane, Zach Inglis, Derek Feath­er­stone (thanks for the Star Wars arcade time) and many, many oth­ers. This year will be the first time that I’ll be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel with the likes of Dan Rubin, Anton Peck and Glenda Sims. (more to fol­low on that)
  • Trag­i­cally, how­ever, my mother passed away at the age of 45. It came as quite a shock to my brother and I as we had no clue that she was so sick. For the both us, it was a heart­felt and coming-of-age expe­ri­ence shared with our sis­ter whom we’ve had lit­tle con­tact with over the years, or I should say not as much con­tact as we’d like.
  • As a fam­ily we trav­eled once again to Cal­i­for­nia (our old stomp­ing grounds) to visit friends and fam­ily. It was too short but full of mean­ing and good mem­o­ries to boot.
  • Towards the end of the year my daugh­ter Zoe turned 3 years old, pro­claim­ing, every hour of every minute of every sec­ond of the day, that it was indeed her birth­day. She even let com­plete strangers know of her won­der­ful day.

In the end, 2006 was pretty event­ful and a year I’ll remem­ber for a long time. I’m cross­ing my fin­gers and scrunch­ing my face that 2007 will be just as good and along­side that thought that I’ll meet many oth­ers and con­tinue pur­su­ing my per­sonal goals in life.

To my read­ers, thank you for stay­ing with me this long (yes, you know who you are) and inter­act­ing with what I have to say. You, alone, have made this site some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what it orig­i­nally was sup­posed to be.

I hope every one of your res­o­lu­tions came true last year, and that those you’ve set this year will carry you along.

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