and a happy monday to all! phooey.

yep, this is the kind of government we have now and we are probably going to get more of the same come november.

yeah right, change from an old washinton animal traveling this country with an entourage of LOBBYISTS.



oh, but he was a POW( so were 599 others) let's just get all of the ones that are still with us and hand the keys to d.c. over to them right now and save the energy.







Agency Fights Building Code Born of 9/11


By ERIC LIPTON

Published: September 7, 2008


WASHINGTON — A federal agency has joined some of the nation’s biggest landlords in trying to repeal stronger safety requirements for new skyscrapers that were added to the country’s most widely used building code last year, arguing that they would be too expensive to meet.



Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The new 7 World Trade Center building has wider emergency stairwells and a fire-resistant area on each of its 52 floors.



Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The 54-story Bank of America building near Times Square is in its final stages of completion and also has extra safety features.
The new provisions, which include requiring tall office buildings to have more robust fireproofing and an extra emergency stairwell, were enacted as a result of an exhaustive federal study into the collapse of the twin towers at the World Trade Center seven years ago this week.


The General Services Administration, which serves as the federal government’s property manager, is now opposing the tougher standards, even though they were based on a report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which issues recommendations for safety standards after investigating fires and other building catastrophes.


“It does not take a NIST report or a rocket scientist to figure out that requiring additional exit stairs will improve overall occupant evacuation times,” David Frable, a General Services Administration fire safety engineer, wrote in a petition asking the International Code Council to rescind the changes, which go to a vote next week. “The bigger question that needs to be answered is at what economic cost to society?”


The dispute reflects a debate among safety officials and real estate executives nationwide as to how to respond adequately to the 2001 attacks.


The fireproofing and stairwell requirements alone could cost real estate developers $13 million for a 42-story office building, as well as perhaps $600,000 a year in lost rent because of decreased floor space, real estate industry officials estimated.

Advocates of the stronger requirements questioned those figures, saying they were inflated. Regardless, they said, they are outraged at the role the federal agency is playing in the debate.


“It is unbelievable to me that our tax dollars are being spent to fight safety improvements,” said Glenn P. Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College in New York City. “They are trying to subvert necessary change.”


The challenges raised by Mr. Frable and building owners and architects focus on three safety standards drawn up by a code council committee that were based on recommendations in the final NIST report from 2005.


Under the new rules, any nonresidential skyscraper over 420 feet tall, or about 40 stories, must have a third stairwell and fireproofing capable of staying in place even if hit with 1,000 pounds per square foot of force, provisions that Mr. Frable and a real estate industry group, the Building Owners and Managers Association, want repealed. As an alternative, Mr. Frable is urging that skyscrapers include specially designed elevators that can reliably operate even during a fire.


Separately, the building owners’ group has asked the organization to repeal a requirement that buildings taller than 75 feet apply glow-in-the-dark markings on stairwells as a backup if the lights go out. Such markings are credited with saving many lives on Sept. 11; they had been installed at the twin towers after the first terror attack there in 1993, even though the enhancement was not yet required by city code.


Only a small number of new towers would be subject to all three of the contested changes. Since 2000, about 10 nonresidential towers taller than 420 feet have been completed each year in the United States, according to Emporis, a German-based database of tall buildings, compared with about 750 such buildings currently standing nationwide.


The matter will go to a vote next week at a meeting of the code council in Minneapolis, where more than 1,000 building-code officials from around the nation will gather to adopt the 2009 version of the so-called model code, which serves as a template for 20,000 jurisdictions in all 50 states, including skyscraper cities like New York, Houston and Philadelphia. The council is a nonprofit association that was created in 1994 to try to develop a single national standard for building safety.


The contested provisions will now be reconsidered as part of a comprehensive review of the building code, which is conducted every three years. Most jurisdictions wait for that larger overhaul before revising their own codes; as a result, few cities have adopted the tougher skyscraper standards.



(yeah, they give a shit about 9/11!)