How has fire safety changed since the 9/11 attacks?

This September 11th marks the 25th anniversary since the terrorist attacks that claimed almost 3,000 lives on the day, and hundreds more due to health complications. The attacks are often seen as a pivot point for the modern world at large, marking the transition from the optimistic 90s into the new millennium.

What 9/11 also represents is a landmark event in disaster response, and one whose lessons continue to be relevant today. As terrible as the tragedy was, the way it was handled and the decisions made would prompt discussion and investigation for years to come, and yield improvements that would save countless lives in future.

Communication

Perhaps the biggest lessons learned from the September 11th attacks were around communication. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing had already revealed serious deficiencies in the emergency response, particularly the difficulty communicating with emergency personnel while inside the towers.

Efforts were made to rectify this, including the installation of radio repeaters, essentially signal boosters that would allow for easy radio communication with anyone inside. Unfortunately, these either failed or were not activated properly in most instances on 9/11, and could not be used by the majority of firefighters in the buildings. As a result, it was difficult to establish where personnel and victims were at any given time.

Adding to this was the decision by Mayor Rudy Giuliani to place the city’s emergency command centre inside 7 World Trade Center, which was destroyed after the towers collapsed. As this necessarily had to be abandoned, responsibility for overseeing the rescue effort fell to a temporary command post set up in the North tower lobby.

Firefighters also lacked any way to contact the police or medical personnel at the site, including police helicopters, largely due to the loss of the command centre. They also had no way of relaying information from other information sources at the time, such as TV and radio news reporting. Many messages were instead sent via pagers, which proved a key form of communication.

Some of these issues have been solved by the passage of time. Mobile phones, still relatively new at this point, lacked the capacity to send and receive images or videos, while text messages were only just being popularised around the world. Phone lines were notably not cut to many offices in the attacks, meaning that internet access in such a disaster would likely provide people inside the building with a key communication line.

Planning and communication have also been significantly improved worldwide since the attacks. The nature of the attack was completely unprecedented at the time, and was not something that planning had accommodated for even before the issues with the response. Communication between different emergency services is now better coordinated, with better protocols for relaying information and avoiding crosstalk. Modern radios also allow for better communication across distances and within buildings.

Communications infrastructure is also more resilient than it was back in 2001. A key problem on 9/11 was that much of the city’s communications infrastructure ran through the towers themselves, with the North Tower hosting multiple transmitters. Better modern phone signal coverage might also have helped, both supporting phone communications and the mobile data terminals used to receive reports from dispatch by emergency responders

Fire protection

While the fires in the World Trade Center towers are perhaps not the most notable part of the 9/11 attacks, they still played a significant role. As well as weakening the structural integrity of the buildings, contributing to their collapse, they also prevented any rescue attempt from the roofs of the buildings, and contributed to the perilous conditions inside.

While there was fire protection inside the towers, a lot of it ultimately did more harm than good. This is primarily true of the large quantities of asbestos used in the building, namely the hundreds of tonnes of spray-on fireproof foam within the building superstructure. While this form of asbestos was actually banned from use during the construction of the towers, it still made its way into a large proportion of the lower floors as fireproofing for the steel beams, along with vermiculite plaster and gypsum boards throughout the towers.

The asbestos fibres released during the collapse have been a key factor in the many instances of cancer and serious lung conditions among the first responders. More first responders are now thought to have died from exposure in the years since the disaster than died during it, as well as the many civilian victims and bystanders who have been impacted. Asbestos is now banned in all forms, and remediation continues to remove it from buildings.

The asbestos was also thought to be somewhat ineffective as fireproofing during the disaster. The building’s fireproofing was found to be inadequate during a review following the 1993 bombing, but the improvements were still in an early stage at the time of the attacks. Ultimately, the damage caused by the aircraft likely sheared off much of the fireproof foam that was in place, while the jet fuel accelerated the fire in a way that couldn’t have been anticipated.

Sprinklers were in place, but the lines were unfortunately severed, meaning that any water from the storage tanks on the roofs would have quickly drained away. While it’s uncertain to what extent modern fireproofing would have helped, both passive and active fire protection have come a long way since 2001. It is plausible that modern passive fire protection may have withstood the initial impacts better than the asbestos foam—if not preventing the collapse, then at least providing more time for the rescue operation.