Sky-high disaster planning for Toronto’s tallest office towers is big business for a former Virginia firefighter.
First Canadian Place, Scotia Plaza and Commerce Court, among Canada’s highest office towers, have each shelled out $60,000 to $80,000 (US.) in the past few years for personalized disaster pre-plans, says Curtis Massey.
Massey is head of a Virginia based disaster planning company whose thousands of clients stretch across North America and include the Empire State building and the New York Stock Exchange.
The disaster plans are critical systems plans and directional aids to help fire crews find victims and navigate their way efficiently through fire and billowing smoke, blackout or collapsed towers, Massey explains.
The former fire lieutenant was in Toronto recently to meet with and present the final disaster pre-plans to Commerce Court management. Massey, 46, a 20-year veteran firefighter, calls the made-to-measure plans “an atlas road map of the building…not a blueprint, not an evacuation plan.”
Disaster pre-plans for each building are protected in a high-security steel vault mounted to the wall at the fire command centre near the lobby. The plans include concise facts about the building alarm systems, access, stairwell configuration, fire hose cabinets, contact numbers and names, water sources and interior oddities, as well as detailed systems layouts of each floor, from ventilation systems to gas risers, shut-off valves, emergency exits, hazardous materials, steel frames and a grid of the support columns and mechanical, electrical and structural drawings.
“The plans are very unique, they’re extremely comprehensive. . .platinum level of fire plans compared to what the basic level of (fire code) requirements are,” said the Toronto fire department’s acting divisional commander Robert Head, who is chairman of the high-rise committee.
Unfortunately, no such sophisticated plans were available when New York’s World Trade Center towers collapsed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, said Massey, who’d gone to New York on business that morning and ended up volunteering with the grueling search efforts at Ground Zero for 10 days. When he got to Ground Zero, Massey found that plans to the twin towers were destroyed during the collapse. So Massey spent six days tracking down the blueprints for the towers, finally locating them in a New Jersey warehouse. But when Massey got the blueprints, they were so complicated the emergency crews couldn’t interpret them. So he brought in his planning team from Virginia and together they created colour-coded search-and-rescue graphics based on the blueprints for the sublevels of the towers that survived the collapse “that were user-friendly for firefighter operations.”
“If we’d had the plan (before the collapse) it may have made a difference,” said Massey as he walked through Toronto’s core with a Star reporter, past the skyscrapers that hold his plans.
Although Massey has been disaster planning for 18 years, he is at the vanguard of an emerging profession that has come into its own since 9/11. His staff includes former and current fire chiefs and officials from throughout the U.S. and Canada. “The sensitivities that arose from the 9/11 situation brought it (the need for a disaster plan) more to the forefront,” said Steven Sorensen, director of property management for Commerce Court and GWL Realty Advisors, who hired Massey last year to do a building pre-plan for Commerce Court that was completed last month. Sorensen calls the pre-plan “an expensive undertaking” for Commerce Court’s four office towers comprised of about 3 million square ft., but said it was well worth the peace of mind for the “extraordinary detailed and comprehensive package,”
Massey found his business niche by recognizing there was “an insufficient exchange of pertinent information between the fire departments and building managers and building owners” said Moshe Wertheim, a mechanical engineer and senior vice-president for O & Y Enterprise, which owns First Canadian Place and manages Scotia Plaza Both companies received their disaster plans two years ago.
“The whole team, the fire department, our operations team, would have been drilled in using this book,” Wertheim said.