New Phase of Building Code Changes Looms

The terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11 committed one, purely inadvertent act of charity: They struck early. By plowing American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower at 8:46 a.m., they hit a building that held about 8,900 people as opposed to the 19,800 people who might have been inside later in the day. And thanks to the 16 minutes that elapsed between the first impact and the strike on the south tower, many of the 8,500 people who were in the second building gained a precious few minutes' head start on their journey to safety. Had both buildings been fully occupied, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) believes that 14,000 people might have died in the collapses.

Timing was just one of the variables in play. Life and death hinged on where a person was, where the plane hit and how the twin towers had been designed three decades earlier. Flight 11 slammed into the part of 1 WTC where the three exit stairwells were bunched closest together. All 1,393 people trapped above the impact died. United Flight 175, on the other hand, cut 2 WTC at a point where the stairwells were farthest apart—leaving one path to safety open for a few minutes. At least 18 people in the south tower made it from above the impact zone to safety. Some 619 were trapped above and died.

Relatively few people who were below the floors of impact perished: about 107 in the north tower and a mere 11 in the south tower. It's eerie to imagine how many more might have lived if the designers of the towers had obeyed the city's building code and designed the buildings with four stairwells as opposed to three or if a loosening of New York's building requirements during the time when the WTC was being designed hadn't permitted them to slash the number of stairwells from the six that would have been required.

The detailed NIST investigation laid bare the need for changes in regulation, and many modifications have been incorporated into the three full revisions of the national-model International Building Code since the attacks. But the real-estate lobby opposed some of the improvements that safety advocates wanted, with the Building Owners and Managers Association fighting to make sure "the NIST recommendations are not used as justification for introducing unnecessary new requirements in state and local building codes."

In 2008, New York City for the first time adopted a model building code. This included sweeping changes, like requiring wider stairs, stronger stairwells and built-in voice communication systems for firefighters in high rises. Most of these rules apply only to new buildings. There is a rule that all buildings 100 feet or taller—new or existing—must install sprinklers, but the deadline isn't until 2019. "We wanted seven years. The opposition got it to 2019," says Jack Murphy, a retired New Jersey fire chief and national code expert. He says the push for better sprinkler coverage dates from the days when the WTC was built. "It's 50 years we've been talking about this."

New York City's code revision was based on the 2003 International Code Council model code. Since then, the code has been revised twice, with a third revision due out in 2012. So New York is preparing to update its own code once again. Some big-ticket items could be on the table. One is the question of whether all new one- and two-family homes should have sprinklers; the new International Residential Code says they should. FDNY, meanwhile, is interested in having the code address all the new uses of New York's roofs—for cellular phone equipment, plants, solar panels, decks and cocktail hours.