April 11, 2005—A federal report about the collapse of the World Trade Centers concludes that new measures are needed to evacuate people from skyscrapers and get emergency workers to those in need more quickly, according to sources familiar with the report, says an article in USA Today. The report, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will also give details about early decisions that made a difference in who lived and who died.
The evacuation models are important because architects use them to calculate the capacity needed in stairwells, elevators, and other means of exiting a building.
The findings represent NIST’s last step before issuing its final recommendations in June, the culmination of exhaustive research and testing that produced 10,000 pages of data. To see the newspaper article, go to the USA Today Web site.
