where there any building code violations in the World Trade Center?

Question

i saw a documentry the other day about people who were trapped in the elevators, and another showing minute by minute as it happen (with so reinactment).

with the elevators, some elevators were equipt with special doors to prevent people from opening them if they should become stuck in them. the only way open them was with a crowbar.

the minute by minute (with reanactment) showed how many stairwells were locked both from above the impact (which could have been their olny way out), and locked from most other spots that pretty much slowed down the rescue, and exiting times.

what else did the WTC have problems with?

Answer 1

Well it had something like 100 Tons of asbestos.

Answer 2

What documentary was this? The elevators were shut down because the shaft was damaged by the impact of a gigantic airplane. All elevators open in a very difficult way. Once you slide the inner doors open, you have to unlatch the outer doors and slide them open. But once they got one of the elevators working again, they dropped it to the bottom and got everyone out. The stairwells were never shut off. There people who made it all the way down to the bottom from above the impact.

Evacuation might have been much quicker and the firemen hadn't told the people to go back up stairs...

In fact, the stairs were in perfect keeping with code--44". But that's not very wide. One guy said if the stairs had been made 58", people could have walked side by side, and firemen could walk up around them.

There were no violations that we know of. Everything was up to code, but code wasn't good enough for that impact.

Come on, man, a freaking plane hit the building. Did you expect them to really know what that was going to be like when they designed the building????

Answer 3

"102 Minutes" by Dwyer and Flynn gives many examples of building code weaknesses in designing and building the WTC.

In order to build quickly and with less attention to safe building code practices, the WTC was placed in the purview of the Port Authority.
What this did was to build the WTC under regulation that was less stringent than building codes in New Jersey or New York. Though this book is meant to reconstruct that horrible day with several anecdotes of human courage, along the way it
mentions a great number of poor building practices and adherence to person safety that contributed I think to many, many deaths. These violations run the gamut from overly heavy utilization of space and real estate to maximize
rental income, to thinner, less fire-resistant walls, light steel webs built into trusses to replace beam-and-column construction, spray-on fireproofing for the steel instead of fire-resistant steel, lack of fire-resistance testing of
the floors, asbestos fireproofing that fell off the steel, size and number of stairwells and other escape strategies. The list is seemingly endless, yet is by rar NOT the focal point of this excellent book.

Before 9/11 remedial construction at the WTC had goine on over three decades, mainly to address the lack of fireproofing issues.

Answer 4

Some codes were wrong.

It is true that asbestos fibers in the air and rubble following the collapse of the World Trade Center is adding to fears in the aftermath of Tuesday’s terrorist attack. The true tragedy in the asbestos story, though, is the lives that might have been saved but for 1970s-era hysteria about asbestos.
Until 30 years ago, asbestos was added to flame-retardant sprays used to insulate steel building materials, particularly floor supports. The insulation was intended to delay the steel from melting in the case of fire by up to four hours.
In the case of the World Trade Center, emergency plans called for this four-hour window to be used to evacuate the building while helicopters sprayed to put out the fire and evacuated persons from the roof.
The use of asbestos ceased in the 1970s following reports of asbestos workers becoming ill from high exposures to asbestos fibers. The Mt. Sinai School of Medicine’s Irving Selikoff had reported that asbestos workers had higher rates of lung cancer and other diseases. Selikoff then played a key role in the campaign to halt the use of asbestos in construction.
In 1971, New York City banned the use of asbestos in spray fireproofing. At that time, asbestos insulating material had only been sprayed up to the 64th floor of the World Trade Center towers.

Answer 5

it wasnt rated to hold the weight of a plane. and most companies have stairwells that lock, its for safety, and you need a passkey to open the doors. as for elevators, why would you have it so that someone could open the doors? thats just unsafe!

Answer 6

what happened what completely unexpected; would you really think when you're constructing a building "is this going to be ok if a plane hits it?"

I doubt that that was one of the scenarios that was tested

Answer 7

WATCH THIS

http://www.loosechange911.com/

Its free and it just makes sense...