The attack on the Twin Towers was further proof that in the event of a disaster in skyscrapers, the two main rescue systems - the elevators and the emergency stairs - fail. Two Israeli inventions - a rescue vehicle that is driven on a special rail on the walls and a "sleeve" through which you can slide from the upper floors - offer an external rescue.
Amnon Barzilai
The rescue vehicle. The rail would most likely have broken from its hold when the planes collided with the walls of the twin towers
In January 2000, a meeting was held in the office of New York City Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen. In the meeting, which was attended by the commander of the fire force and senior staff, two Israelis also participated: Brigadier General (Ret.) Avi Bachar, former deputy commander of the Home Front Command in the IDF, and engineer Aryeh Harshtik. They were invited to participate in a discussion about unique systems for the rescue of tall buildings.
The Twin Towers were visible from the windows of Van Essen's office, and those present talked about the threats of terrorism and rescue in the event of a fire or an earthquake. What will happen, Avi Bakr asked, in the event of another attack on the Twin Towers. Maybe next time the terrorist organizations will not choose a car bomb like it was in 1993 and maybe it will even be a plane that will hit the towers? The question remains unanswered.
sleeve. A change in slope may stop surfing and create a traffic jam
In a meeting held twenty months before the attack on the Twin Towers, New York's fire chiefs presented to the Israelis their procedure for extinguishing fires in the towers: call 300 firefighters who are divided into three groups. A third of the firefighters are prepared at the command post in the lobby on the entrance floor of the tower, in the second group about 100 firefighters carrying the equipment and climbing the stairs to the upper floors; The third group, which also includes a hundred firefighters, is located two floors below the floor where the fire broke out and deals with extinguishing, with the extinguishing work being done in three shifts of twenty minutes each. According to Bacher, "the result is that out of 18 firefighters in New York, of which 300 firefighters are sent to the scene, only 30 firefighters are fighting the fire at one point in time."
In July of this year, about ten months after the attack on the Twin Towers, the headquarters of the Home Front Command, led by Major General Yosef Mishlev, held an internal workshop dealing with the rescue of tall buildings. The meeting attended by representatives of the Israel Police, the Fire Department, Magen David Adom (MDA) and a representative of the Tel Aviv Municipality was held, and not by chance, on one of the highest floors of the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv. The two main messages that emerged at the meeting: it is assumed that tall buildings in Israel will be a target for terrorist attacks, and that proper advance preparation may reduce the extent of casualties.
As a step towards early preparation, the Israeli Standards Institute appointed a committee at the beginning of the month to establish a new standard for rescue facilities from tall buildings. In the world, standards have not yet been formulated for this matter and the CEO of the Standards Institute, Ziva Patir, states on the institute's website that the means of escape that exist today in Israel and in the world are limited to stairwells and rescue ladders that are only able to reach up to a certain number of floors (11 floors, IV). The new standard is designed to help rescue people from tall buildings that cranes and rescue ladders cannot reach. The Home Front Command Headquarters, the Fire and Rescue Authority, construction consultants, firefighting experts and representatives of the Standards Institute participate in the committee for drafting the standard.
The committee will examine the function required of rescue facilities during an emergency, in accordance with the environment and the building. Thus, for example, the committee will examine the requirements regarding the strength and connections of rescue facilities, their resistance to fire over time, as well as the area where they will be installed. According to the standard, the escape facility will also allow the rescue of disabled people. The facilities will be inspected and their function will be under regular supervision similar to the maintenance of elevators in shared buildings. Also, a control system will be required that will allow the facility to be operated without any difficulty in an emergency.
Two groups of businessmen will present before the committee developments of new facilities for rescuing people from high-rise buildings. One group, led by Ehud Barak and former commander of the Home Front Command Colonel (Ret.) Ze'ev Levana, recently organized around Eli Nir who developed a sleeve-like rescue device. At the beginning of the month, the group unveiled the sleeve in Washington. It consists of a strong and fireproof fabric sleeve - supported by a steel spring - inside which you can slide safely to the ground. The sleeve is intended for use in cases of fire, terrorist attacks and earthquakes. It is installed in a permanent system on the upper floors, and is opened in an emergency using detectors. The end of the sleeve is anchored to the ground with a safety cable. The sleeve is intended for the rescue of the entire population, including children and the disabled and even the injured who are harnessed to a stretcher specially developed for this purpose. It is designed for the rescue of buildings up to 20 stories high, at a rate of 15 people per minute. The price of one rescue sleeve is $20, and the total cost for the building is derived from the number of floors and the number of sleeves that will be installed on each floor.
A second group, the "Ishratim" company, led by Brigadier General (Ret.) Bacher and Col. Yuri Sofrin, former head of the Defense Department at the Home Front Command, will present a rescue vehicle developed by Aryeh Hershtiq. This is a kind of external elevator that will move on a railway that will be permanently installed on the external wall of the building. The vehicle is designed to carry about 10 people and its movement speed on the track can reach up to 140 meters per minute. It will be kept at the fire station and in the event of an emergency the firefighters will connect it to the rail. Herstik invested about 1.5 million dollars of his own money in developing a prototype and also registered an international patent for it.
In a meeting with New York firefighters, Hershtik and Bacher presented the advantages of the rescue vehicle: it saves the need for elevators or the slow and tiring climbing of stairs. It is powered by a generator and therefore does not depend on the municipal electricity sources that are usually interrupted in case of emergency; And it is two-way. It is able to lift firefighters onto their equipment, and on its way down, drop off survivors.
In January 1999, a demonstration of the rescue vehicle was held in front of the personnel of the Home Front Command. Following the demonstration, the head of the population defense department at the time, Col. Avi Gross, wrote to the National Fire Commissioner that "it seems to me that an effort should be made to promote the solution of the external elevator that does not depend on the internal systems of the building itself." Gross noted the ease of operation of the vehicle, which would avoid the need for long training, and its cheap price compared to the cost of elevators and emergency stairs.
The price of one meter of the track developed by Herstik is $1,000. The cost of installing one rail in a 50-story building is approximately $800. It is possible to build additional rails, on each side of the building, and the cost accordingly. The cost of the rescue vehicle is about 250 thousand dollars and according to the proposal, each fire station will own and maintain 2-1 rescue vehicles.
For comparison, the cost of installing the known emergency systems in residential buildings is about 80,000 dollars per floor, and in a 50-story building it reaches 4 million dollars. But it is still too early to determine if the new systems can completely replace the existing ones.
Both solutions, Nir's sleeve and Herstik's rescue vehicle, offer rescue from high-rise buildings using external systems. Despite the great differences between them, both proposals express a lack of training in the existing emergency facilities in the buildings for the rescue of trapped people: the emergency stair system and the elevator network. This after it turned out that the systems failed in all major disasters. The elevators are not working because of the power cut; The special stairwells are supposed to be smoke-proof, but panicked people do not listen to the order not to open doors and the smoke enters the stairwells. This means an unnecessary expenditure of millions of dollars in the construction of rescue systems in tall buildings that do not stand the test in the moment of truth.
The inventor Nir, like Bacher and Rashtik before him, presented the system he developed to the fire chiefs of the City of New York. Nir says that the system was treated favorably there. However, the two Israeli facilities do not provide an answer to an attack of the magnitude of the one in the coordination towers. The track designed by Harshtiq would most likely have been dislodged from its grip on the walls of the twin towers when the planes collided, and Nir's "sleeve" is anyway designed for extrication from buildings up to 20 stories only. Nir claims that with the help of this technology, it is possible to rescue trapped people even from towers a hundred stories high, but in an event like that of the Twin Towers, dozens of sleeves would be required to rescue people simultaneously from all floors. In this case there is a fear that the sleeves will fall on each other.
Another difficulty: the less steep the slope, the sleeve may turn into a kind of hammock that will eliminate the ability to slide and create a traffic jam of people who will get stuck in the belly of the sleeve without the possibility of getting out of it. Another problem: to ensure a measured and safe slope, which will slow down the speed of the slide, you have to move a long way away from the building and anchor the end of the sleeve in the ground. The higher the building, the greater the distances, and it is doubtful whether there are empty spaces around the towers with a radius of at least 100 meters, to stabilize the sleeves. And most importantly, it is doubtful if the sleeve would have survived the high heat for such a long period of time.
In view of the disappointment with the existing emergency systems, one would think that the innovations would be received with enthusiasm, and indeed in March 2000 the head of the Tel Aviv District Commander's Office of the Israel Police, Superintendent Ilan Mor, wrote to the Commissioner of Fire and Rescue at the time, Rabbi Tafser Moshe Vardi, and recommended working to approve a standard that would require the construction of a track Suitable for new high-rise buildings. In April 2000, Rabbi Tafser Vardi replied in a short letter: "The system for rescuing people trapped in high-rise buildings has been tested by us and we do not intend to implement it as a standard system in the fire services in Israel."
According to the law, the party responsible for operating the equipment for rescuing people trapped in high-rise buildings in fires or terrorist activities are the firefighting and rescue units. The Israel Police is the authorized and responsible party for dealing with terrorist attacks of all kinds, and is joined by the fire and rescue forces and MDA.
According to experts in the field of rescue, the field of firefighting in the State of Israel must undergo a shake-up. The local fire stations are professionally subordinate to the National Fire Commission, but the firefighters receive their wages from the local authority. A senior official in the field of rescue said that "as in other municipal bodies, also in fire stations, there are workers' committees that are threatened by the transition to the use of advanced technologies. They fear that new rescue measures will push them away and harm their status." This is the feeling that Bacher and Rashtik got when they visited the fire headquarters in New York, and according to the senior official, this is also the case in Israel.
In recent years, the Home Front Command has enjoyed the image of a professional agency with rescue and rescue capabilities. However, the rescue units of the Home Front Command are designed to operate during an emergency, war, and are not prepared to provide immediate assistance during a disaster or terrorist attack. After the "Versailles" disaster, in which people were trapped under the ruins of the collapsed hall, the rescue units of the Home Front Command were called and played a significant role, a few hours after the disaster. Even in the case of a terrorist attack such as the Twin Towers, it must be assumed that the rescue units of the Home Front Command will be out of the picture in the first stage.
The contribution of the Home Front Command is in the area of early preparation. In view of the new threats of terrorism, mega-terrorism and natural disasters, a concept of "balanced defenses" is taking shape in the Department of Civil Defense at the Home Front Command, according to which every construction project must be examined from the safety aspect and based on a preliminary analysis, determine which protective measures to take. Thus, for example, according to a senior official in this field at the Home Front Command, it is advisable to plan the construction of towers at certain angles - in accordance with the movement of aircraft in Israel, in the Gush Dan area, which is from west to east - so that they create an optical error that will make it difficult to attack from the air.
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