Concrete construction industry misrepresents 9/11 findings.

In the four years since September 11, 2001, the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and those who lost family members in the World Trade Center tragedy have provided an invaluable service to the city. They fought long and hard for Congress to commission a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigation into factors contributing to the death toll once the planes had struck. The recent disclosure by NIST of its findings, although not with out controversy, is a tribute to the determination of the 9/11 families and to the professionalism of the investigators involved.

It is something else entirely to find a representative of the concrete construction industry peddling disinformation about these findings for self-serving propaganda purposes, as readers found in a recent issue of Real Estate Weekly. An article in Wednesday, June 29th Section B by the president of the Concrete Alliance, Inc. characterizes the NIST findings as "bearing out what his organization has been saying since 9/11," an irresponsible statement intended to leave readers with the impression, however thoughtless, that had the WTC towers been constructed of reinforced concrete, they would have remained standing.

This was not a finding of the NIST report, and there is no basis whatsoever to claim one material safer than the other. In fact, an investigation of the performance of the Pentagon building on 9/11 showed that the reinforced concrete used in constructing this national landmark experienced the same loss of fire protecting cover (concrete in this case) as a result of the plane's impact as did the structural steel in the WTC towers, despite that plane's significantly smaller mass. What the findings communicated was that, when properly designed and constructed, all materials have essentially equivalent levels of safety. Unfortunately, none of the buildings was designed to sustain the unanticipated loadings to which they were subjected on 9/11.

Thus, the interpretations of the NIST findings desired by the Concrete Alliance have no basis in fact and little currency among the engineering community. Shame on the concrete industry partisans for trying to profit from the tragic loss of life on 9/ 11.

Also misleading is an article published without byline in the Wednesday, July 13th Section B of REW that left the reader with the impression that the Skyscraper Safety Campaign had jumped on the reinforced concrete bandwagon. This is not the case. The Concrete Alliance and advisors to the Safety campaign met in a meeting requested by the Alliance for the stated purpose of promoting the use of reinforced concrete in high-rise construction as an alternative to the more widely used structural steel. The campaign took no position except that which they have repeatedly sought--safety and survivability in high-rise structures.

The article also quotes the president of the Alliance as saying that "the city's new building code should improve safety instead of cutting corners." The reference is to an initiative of the Mayor's Model Code Task Force that is working to put in place new construction regulations based upon the International Building Code and elements of other model codes in use around the nation. It is an effort to which the Skyscraper Safety Campaign has lent strong support, and which has benefited from the involvement of more than 400 talented and respected members of New York's building industry.

Members of the task force have spent hundreds of thousands of hours pro bono in advancing the safety interests of the city. Rather than criticizing their efforts, the Alliance should recognize the efforts of the task force as more conducive to achieving an appropriate level of safety in high-rise buildings than by its own self-serving misinformation.

Gary Higbee AIA, director of industry development, The Steel Institute of New York