28

The Thieving Magpies

Violet Jessop's friend and idol, shipbuilder Thomas Andrews, had designed the Titanic from the keel up to its mast wires, adding davits that were intended to pivot back from one stacked lifeboat to another, loading and releasing them like shotgun shells. Andrews's own notebooks made clear his intention to provide enough lifeboat space for every passenger and member of the crew, but the Board of Trade laws did not call for any more lifeboats on a large ship than on a small one.

To provide more deck space, the stacks of boats behind the multilaunch davits were eliminated, and the number of lifeboats was cut in half. The watertight compartments would prevent a flood within the ship from spreading, and in principle (and under the law), the safety of the compartments permitted the reduction of the number of lifeboats. Then, to provide larger luxury suites, the Turkish baths, and broader uninterrupted floor spaces, the height of several watertight compartments along the center of the ship had been lowered almost a full deck. Andrews was overruled at each vital turning point. This did not seem to matter, because the watertight compartments (even if reduced in height) had rendered the Titanic worthy of the title put to Edith Russell when she had become nervous and considered leaving the ship before it left Cherbourg: unsinkable.

During the same year that the Titanic's davits were having their lifeboat capacity reduced by half, 146 young women were killed in Manhattan's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The investigators concluded that a reason for such high mortality was the scarcity of effective fire escape routes and “safe haven” fire towers within the building. Until the year 1968, the post–Triangle disaster fire codes eliminated the concept of fireproof technology and called for reinforced smoke-locked fire towers and enough stairwells, widely spaced throughout the diameter of a building, to allow escape for all occupants. The Verizon building, built in 1927 and rising thirty-two stories tall, withstood steel beams crashing through foot-thick reinforced concrete floors when the North Tower's column-collapse effect struck the earth at 120 miles per hour and sent forth a pyroclastic surge cloud that deposited a pile of debris a story deep at the Verizon building's south face.

More significant, after the Verizon workers entered the skyscraper and began jerry-rigging emergency communications lines—draping them out of windows and along West Street—there were more than enough fire escape systems still intact when, after four hours, word came through that building 7, next door, was “fully involved” in fire and might collapse. Afterward, one could only look with admiration upon the architect. He must have been out to challenge the staying power of the pyramids. Even after the east face of the Verizon building was torn open by building 7's column collapse at sixty miles per hour, enough of the structure remained operationally intact for volunteers to return up the fire stairs and continue stringing emergency communications lines out the west side windows.

The same regulations that kept the Verizon building humming while everything around it failed had governed the construction of the Empire State Building in 1931. An insulated, air-locked, fire tower stairwell ran, as a single vertical shaft, through the entire height of the building. Five concrete-reinforced stairwells ran all the way down to the sixth floor, where they were met by four additional stairwells leading down to the street.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were a beautiful design that was abused. The two towers differed from their predecessor skyscrapers in deviating from a steel-cage design. Borrowing from nature, each tower had much of its structural support moved to the outer frame of the building, following the same basic blueprint as a stick of bamboo. An inner tube of interlocking steel followed the same principle. This design did not answer the question of why the towers fell but rather of why they stood long enough, against impossible punishment, to permit more than thirty thousand people to escape the danger zone. The fault lay in safety systems and in lessons forgotten.

Like Thomas Andrews, chief architect Minoru Yamasaki had put forth the right design. It was the magpies who, turning bamboo resilience and new concepts in fire-tight compartmentalization into complacency, began tampering with codes and regulations and contributed, in a single day, to the trapping of so many people above the fires that the loss of life would become comparable to two Titanic disasters.

A new system of lightweight trusses that bound each tower's inner and outer bamboo tubes was strong, but in the event of a fire, a web of steel sheets and wires heated and softened faster than a network of I-beams. Despite the inherent strength of the outer and inner bamboo structure, the trusses became one of several Achilles's heels. As with the critical bulkhead between boiler room numbers 5 and 6, the steel did not actually have to melt; weakening alone was the path to a lethal cascade effect.

The next fatal decision involved the World Trade Center's analogue to lifeboats. In 1968, the laws intended to guarantee fire escape systems for all occupants in a building were rewritten, and Yamasaki's design began to undergo further mutations.

Gone was the traditional fire tower of the Verizon building and the Empire State Building. The six widely spaced stairwells originally designed into each of the Twin Towers were reduced to three, all concentrated in the central cores, each enclosed in plasterboard instead of concrete.

Prior regulations had required fire exits on each floor to be “remote” from each other—“so that a single problem could not obstruct all the ways out,” observed New York Times investigators Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. “The new [1968] code amended that language in a small but significant way: when more than one exit was required, each now had to be [only] ‘as remote from the others as is practicable.'”

The rentable square footage for offices and restaurants with wide-open spaces and world-class views was multiplied by eliminating a fire tower and widely separated, fire-resistant stairwells. Technically, all of the necessary laws and regulations were being obeyed to the letter as the final design for the Twin Towers was put into place. Just as the letter of the law had produced wide-open deck spaces and required the same lifeboat capacity for Captain Smith's Titanic as for Albert Moss's much smaller Hebe, the letter of the law required the same number of fire escape pathways for a quarter-mile-high city tower as for an apartment building only seven stories tall.

But then, this did not seem to matter, because new engineering methods had rendered the old codes of the Verizon building archaic. The worst fires imaginable could easily be contained until firefighting equipment put the flames out. Sprinkler systems and advances in the science of compartmentalization had rendered the buildings “fireproof.”