kartooner

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.