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Occupant Safety & Escape Technology Innovation MUST become THE key issue, in WTC Reconstruction.
The project is dazzling - an undeniable expression of Architectural Power expressing the Triumph of the Human Mind and Spirit. Like Flight, natural and mechanical, it is a Re-iteration of the Life Message; a source of its own, and in its own right, a life giver, in ways, profound and powerful.
If we apprehend every terrorist or saboteur on earth, though, buildings will still collapse, and planes crash. We can never promise otherwise. We can, however, mimimize loss of human life in such instances, by, finally behaving responsibly in the matter of Occupant Safety & Escape Technology Innovation.
However, what ought to be an obvious and commanding concept was fated to be tried long ago, before technolgy was ready for its requirments, and then, when it proved a spectacular failure, the whole idea was buried, as deep as it goes, and its inventors humiliated. And so the idea was suppressed most effectively - not even brought up in conversation or thought, 'ever after'.
OK, but "what about now?"
With normal attention, and NOT suppression, Occupant Safety & Escape Technology Innovations might have been one of the Jewels of the American Bi-Centennial Celebrations in 1976, and the horrendous loss of life on Nineleven 2001 averted.
However, so far, Occupant Safety & Escape Technology Innovations remain ignored, failed, defaulted, and even sneered off the list, by those whose offices bear some responsibility in the matter.
The entries/links on this page tell a bit of the story.
But "Needs YOU" to pick up on the idea and share it in YOUR circle, and to your leaders, so that the horrendous loss of life we suffered need never happen again.
Enjoy and respond, if possible.
Final Tally - 2,749
Friday, January 23, 2004
Final WTC Death Toll Said Down to 2,749
4 hours ago
NEW YORK - Three names have been removed from the list of those killed in the World Trade Center attack, bringing the death toll to 2,749, which could stand as the final count, according to a newspaper report.
The official list of those missing now matches the number of death certificates the city has issued for victims for the first time, The New York Times reported Friday.
"Based on the information we have now, we believe this is the final number," Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city's medical examiner, told the Times.
Three names were removed from the list of the missing this week after officials could not confirm that they were killed, the Times said.
Two weeks after the attack, the number of missing-person reports peaked at 6,886 amid confusion and calls from frantic relatives. The number stood at 2,792 from December 2002 until October, when 40 unsolved cases were removed from the list.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A third~millennium song
"We are diverse and the diversity is the dynamic!
Exhilirated
at the sense of our role as visitors in the universe.
We who visit are the sons of the morning,
the daughters of the day!
We have seen our souls at noon,
on the busy park in the center of town,
and danced to rhythms of our own work!
As always, there is the futility,
certainty of disaster, but also of salvation!
We glitter in the interactive,
more and better than ever before and,
accepting our part in the diversity of who we are,
we stopped the lament!
We found our lights!
and we share wholeheartedly,
our individual contributions,
scrambling to use the new lights well;
sons of the morning, daughters of the day -
making a day of light once again!"
Ellen Smith Fagan
Copyright 2003 Ellen Smith Fagan
Comments Two Years Later ~ September 11, 2003
Most of us have it down to normal tears, the hated word "Time" is still the tyrant,
the ugly, bossy nurse dominating the healing process for all grieved, now and always.The Beauty and Power of the Human Spirit...we find, to our delight, that we DO recover! Nothing can undo such a brutal pain. Its memory will always be there, but we find that, Life and Love will not be denied. Do it easy , or do it hard...but the powers of the life forces in us will win !
The now-famous
"bathtub", the foundation of the Twin Towers, apparently saved most of Lower Manhattan from total inundation by the waters of the the Harbor, when the buildings collapsed.
It acted as a retaining wall in a scenario which could have been even worse than it was.
This foundation has become a symbol of the Indomitable American Spirit, which withstands a great deal, survives and wins again!
Excerpted from NYtimes:
In 9/11 Design, Rules Are Set to Be Broken
By EDWARD WYATT
Officials overseeing the competition to design a memorial to the victims
of the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center promised yesterday that all entries would be
considered, even those that stray from the official guidelines for the
placement and content of the memorial.
At a news conference announcing the start of the design competition,
some of the jurors who will select the winner encouraged entrants to
challenge those boundaries. Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial and one of 13 jurors in the World Trade Center
competition, challenged entrants to come up with "a new way of defining
what a memorial can be."
Another juror, James E. Young, a scholar with expertise in memorials and
remembrance, said of entrants: "Anything they might have in mind, any
response, will be considered here. We want architects and artists ,
anybody who submits, to feel they can go where their imaginations,
where their mourning needs to take them in order to articulate some
relationship to this terrible loss."
In essentially voiding some of the guidelines that they had just
released, the officials said they were trying to signal that neither the
memorial competition nor the jury would be influenced by the kind of
political pressure that shaped the selection of Daniel Libeskind's
design for the trade center site.
Earlier this year, a committee of directors of the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation recommended a design by a group called Think,
one of two finalists in the site competition. Think proposed two
latticework towers as a symbolic replacement for the destroyed twin towers.
But Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who favored
Mr. Libeskind's design, overruled the directors.
Kevin Rampe, the interim president of the development corporation, which
is overseeing the competition, said yesterday that officials were open
to the possibility that "it may take going outside of those guidelines"
for competitors to express their creativity.
As an example of breaking boundaries, Dr. Young pointed to Ms. Lin, who
he said "broke some of the rules on the way to her spectacular Vietnam
Veterans Memorial," and to Mr. Libeskind, the architect of the site
design, who "had to break all kinds of rules to make his design."
Mr. Libeskind will be a technical consultant to the jury, but he will
not be involved in the selection of the winning design, Mr. Rampe said.
Competitors have until May 29 to register and until June 30 to submit
their designs. The field will be narrowed to about five finalists, and
the winner will be selected in the fall, officials said.
The officials said that all entries must conform to the display
guidelines published by the development corporation. Those can be seen
at www.wtcsitememorial.org on the Internet or obtained by faxing a
request, with the entrant's mailing address, to 800-717-5699.
A $25 entry fee is required to register for the competition. Officials
said the money would go toward building the memorial.
The guidelines say that competitors may create a memorial "of any type,
shape, height or concept," that includes five physical elements:
Officials expect all those elements to be placed within the 4.5 acres
bounded by the walls built to hold back the waters of the Hudson River.
The walls are at the center of Mr. Libeskind's design.
But the guidelines also note that areas outside the sunken area can be
included in a design and "may be considered by the jury if, in
collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, they are
deemed feasible and consistent with site plan objectives."
The jury, made up largely of artists, museum curators and design
professionals, also includes a downtown resident and the spouse of a
victim of the 9/11 attack.
Paula Grant Berry, a juror whose husband, David, was killed at the trade
center, said the memorial would "be for all the people of New York and
really for the world, but especially for all the families."
Ms. Berry added: "I am determined that a memorial be built where we will
be proud to bring our children. We must never lose sight of why we are
doing this and who we are doing it for. Magnificent people died, and we
must be magnificent in how we honor them."
Asked what advice she had for those entering the competition, Ms. Lin
said: "You enter a competition not necessarily to win but to say what
you truly believe needs to be done there. I think you should think about
what could a memorial be here. Is it a place? Is it an object? Does it
frame the site? I hope we get submissions from people who just believe
that their solution is right."
A Remedy: Escape pods for Tall Buildings and Airplanes
Aeronautical Engineers' idea, tabled for tech reasons in the fifties,
are probably possible now. Get involved in its support if you can!
The attacks of September 11, 2001 changed a lot of lives.
The worst of it is that they did not need to happen!
If a prosecuteable case against Osama Bin Laden had been able to be made,
after his earlier attacks, and the man and his Taliban brought to justice
in a more timely fashion, the Twin Towers would still be soaring to the heavens,
and thousands of grieving survivors would be doing life normally.
If escape concepts for the planes and skyscrapers,
"on the drawing board" fifty years ago, had been developed,
perfected and put into use, once again, this latest terrorist crisis would,
at least, have been less costly in lives lost.
The Third Millennium is full of miracles of the best kind,
but it is also guaranteed to bring its share of horrors.
It is not likely that terrorism will be eliminated completely;
we must have our freedom to experience acceptable quality of life.
But there is no reason for it to cost lives to the extent
that we have so horribly experienced.
Even the basic civil defense-type preparedness reduced
the casualties at the Pentagon attack site
from an early estimate of 800 to around one hundred-a significant number,
and one that should encourage preparedness in all of us.
The airport next to the building, with planes parked within view of Pentagon staff,
motivated a workshop of a sort...
"What if one of those planes slipped and crashed into the building?"
The logic of any eight-year-old mind resulted in a plan of
escape from the Pentagon building,achieved just a few weeks before the attack:
which routes to take, basic fire safety response review,
and a buddy system for helping others in the office.
These few actions saved SEVEN HUNDRED LIVES!
And yet such simple work is still carried out by too few ,
and the concept of developing technology for fast, reliable escape/evacuation from planes and skyscrapers,
though fairly simple, in our tech-genius world, has been ignored entirely.
At nineleven, a few home handyman ideas received publicity, and sneers.
One "left-handed blessing" of this cry for deliverance from such endangerment has resulted in much-improved Preparedness in other areas, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security's invention, and
the efforts of public and private groups and individuals, but much of these wonderful new ideas would not have saved the occupants of WTC in a similar scenario.
For my late Father, and my late husband, both with science achievements,
and into their work, others of their groups,
I feel duty-bound on this subject:
In the fifties, my Father showed us a Popular Mechanics
magazine with art showing the passenger compartment
of an airplane sliding away from a burning airplane,
like a train car with a parachute, taking the passengers safely to ground
....nearly fifty years ago!
"Wha'hoppen? ", he would be saying if he could......why have there
been no followups on such ideas?
Similarly, not visible externally, but like elevator cars on each floor,
escape pods, operating with mechanics
independent of the power systems in a skyscraper,
could easily eject/evacuate a building's occupants in a few moments,
providing a bailout, at every floor level, and
elevators and stairwells ,"killer chimneys"in such a scenario, would not need to be used.
Primitive graphics of the idea described here will be passed to
any who might implement it, but only on request.
I had to grow up and stay in my focus like everyone else.
Why did not the architects, builders, owners, or occupants
of the Towers insist on a simple escape technology?
In every other area of life, safety escapes are required.
In the eye-opening aftermath of this tragedy,
such concepts are so difficult to deal with!
We are genius, all-powerful, modern Americans!
We don't do dumb stuff!
It is not possible that we could have been so negligent, but we were!
And now our hope of salvation/redemption, from our sins of omission
lies in reconstruction that insures such horror will never happen again!
No matter what government can do about terrorism, no matter what architects can do to help skyscapers withstand attack and collapse, no matter how careful we are
against human error, planes will crash, buildings may collapse, but with the attention
given to effective escape pods, there will not be the horrific loss of life!
Not one of us gets reprieved from this burden until we can say:
GROUND ZERO-type casualties - NEVER AGAIN!
At nine-eleven 2001, my escape pod memory would not leave me alone, so I passed this note around online, with a casual graphic sketch to help the reader understand my description. I sent it to anyone I could find, and showed it to friends and family...e-mailed it to those
relevant in techworld and government, and received two impressive replies!
Friends who had worked with the scientists mentioned above
at United Technologies...librarians, encouraged me to take it to UT.
OSHA also liked my letter and sent me links for proceeding.
United Technologies offices reception desk was one I had passed many times in visits to the Connecticut Commission on the Arts offices and gallery next door. But when I approached the front desk receptionist, I suddenly felt like a wildwoman on a binge of some sort, became embarassed and said "Good Day".
Regrouping, getting moral support and will try again.
I will probably also send this to the wonderful Architect Libeskind, mentioned above.
Whether I achieve or not, "I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind" on the subject, as the song proclaimed.
Update, February 2004:
I have written everyone remotely attached to the project about the jetpack, elevatorcar-like escape pods...and will continue to do so as comfortably fits into my tasking.
Although
OSHA and United Technology people were kind, respectful, even excited, and referred me, I cannot followup on their leads. Because I would need a grant to make it a halftime job to followup effectively, without self-destructing.
My own work demands my priority.
A discovery:
The site for the group of Nineleven Survivors ( link below ). Activated to insure that the WTC reconstruction includes safety mechanisms omitted in the towers.
However, the group is new and so far, have gotten "a promise to install fire extinguishers"....not cool, but interaction.
I think its their grieving......I went through a bad one like that long ago....it is very depleting, and so I question not the motive, but the wisdom of leaving the work governing safety tech decisions for WTC restoration in their hands.
It takes time for a group to get going effectively, and they seem pointed in the right direction...But the correct safety considerations probably need to be achieved before long....will they "get there" in time? Once construction begins,
it may be too late.
Relevant Links
The Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporationoffers data on the heart of the project and links in all directions.
Daniel Liebeskind.comhis page...the Berlin-centered architect whose design tops this page.
The Skyscraper Safety CampaignSurvivors of Nineleven organized to "do better". If you can help them, please do so.
There are other groups involved, many of them very expressive in their desire to find truth in the Nineleven Hearings and implement things that will prevent any such horror from repeating itself. This month, I found stories of these groups chasing, physically, after government representatives who found it necessary to hide behind a door from them. I think they are simply fearful that the matter will not find solution, if the opportunities for it all, "right now" , are denied.
Are they right?
I love aeronautics, and am a loyal fan of it all since childhood...father and brother both with service and postwar work and interests in the skies...but I do not sympathize with the industry, which has been getting a lot of exposée coverage. Hopefully, freedom of the press will win improvements all around.
I welcome respectful comment and questions,
and am always careful to reject or report those whose intent to contact is violent and nettiquette absent. If an issue is important, good manners are essential, or the
issue self-destructs in the mélée.
....elle
Reflecting Pools Picked for 9-11 Memorial
Wed Jan 7, 1:42 AM
By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - A design consisting of two reflecting pools and a large grove of trees was chosen for the World Trade Center memorial after an eight-month competition that drew more than 5,000 entries from around the world, officials announced Tuesday.The "Reflecting Absence" memorial, created by designers Michael Arad and Peter Walker, was chosen by a 13-member jury of artists, architects and civic and cultural leaders. The winning memorial was announced by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency overseeing the rebuilding of the site.
The reflecting pools will mark the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. The development group said a revised version of the memorial will be unveiled next week, with significant changes that add trees and greenery around the footprints and expose the slurry wall, the last surviving piece of the trade center.The design previously had a vast open plaza marked by just a few trees, but will now include "teeming groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth," said jury chairman Vartan Gregorian, of the Carnegie Corporation of New York."The result is a memorial that expresses the incalculable loss of life and its regeneration," Gregorian said.The development agency also said it is flexible about the grouping of victims' names at the memorial, a point bitterly fought by rescue workers who want separate recognition for their colleagues.
Still, the memorial drew an icy reception from some victims' families, who accused the jury of ignoring their input during a hasty deliberation and said the design failed to convey the horror of the attack.Anthony Gardner, who lost his brother in the Sept. 11 attack and is a member of a coalition for family groups, said the design is "unacceptable". "This is minimalism, and you can't minimalize the impact and the enormity of Sept. 11," Gardner said. "You can't minimalize the deaths. You can't minimalize the response of New Yorkers."
The memorial, considered the long shot of three finalists chosen by the jury in November, will remember all of the victims of the Sept. 11 attack, including those killed at the Pentagon, in Pennsylvania and aboard the hijacked airliners. It also will honor the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.The memorial will be one of two focal points at the trade center site, along with the 1,776-foot glass skyscraper known as the Freedom Tower. Four other buildings are planned where the trade center once stood.The two pools in the design would sit 30 feet below street level, connected by an underground passageway and a small alcove where visitors can light candles. "I think it's an idea that is simple, that is bold, that clearly refers to the footprints of the building," said Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the 16-acre site.A jubilant Arad, a 31-year-old Israeli native who has designed two police stations in his job at the city housing authority, said he was surrounded by well-wishers after learning his plan was chosen. "I hope that I will be able to honor the memory of all those who perished and create a place where we may all grieve and find meaning," he said. Walker, a San Francisco-based landscape designer whose major projects include the redevelopment of the site of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, was added to the memorial project after Arad submitted his design.
Not all family members objected to the memorial. Monica Iken, who heads another family group, said jurors "got the message that this is going to be the most visited memorial in the world."
"I think they took their time and thought about the things that families needed in this memorial," she said. Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted that the number of submissions was unprecedented for such a contest. "The most important thing is we come up with the right memorial and this process had thousands of people who had suggestions," Bloomberg said. "They whittled it down from thousands to one. You're not going to please everybody." The jury reviewed 5,201 submissions beginning last summer, narrowing the field to eight in November. By the time the jury convened on Monday, it had chosen three finalists: "Garden of Lights," "Passages of Light: the Memorial Cloud" and "Reflecting Absence." "Garden of Lights" featured a public area filled with lights, one for each victim. The three-level memorial had a garden on the top and a private area for families of the victims at the twin towers' footprints, connected by a path and a stream of water. "Passages of Light," by three New York designers, included an open-air structure with cathedral-like vaults and a glass walkway and would have an altar for each victim.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. printable version © 2003 Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Update June 20, 2004 on:
The sections are separated by horizontal rules to aid in finding the one you prefer.
I sent the letter to a number of valid desks..."there is always hope".
The Incredible Shrinking Daniel Libeskind
By ROBIN POGREBIN
ON Feb. 27, 2003, Daniel Libeskind stood on a podium under the palm trees in the Winter Garden's soaring glass atrium