TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

9/11 fire safety controversy echoes similar theme in The Solomon Scandals novel: Life vs. property

By David Rothman

Guess who’s fighting safety regulations that could save lives in high-rises in the event of 9/11-style terror or other fires.

You are, if at least if you’re a tax-paying American.

None other than our General Services Administration, Uncle Sam’s business arm, which rents buildings from private landlords, is lobbying on behalf of the real estate tycoons opposed to beefed-up safety requirements in a widely implemented building code. Photo is of GSA headquarters, at 18th and F Streets in Washington, D.C.—hopefully fire-proofed sufficiently. GSA gets some loving attention in The Solomon Scandals, my forthcoming newspaper novel, which, yes, explores safety-related issues among others.

Alas, in real life, the real estate tycoons don’t want to have to build extra stairwells and spend money on some other precautions. And GSA is backing them up to the hilt despite a pro-safety report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology—yes, the same agency that so laudably helped pave the way for ePub.

Property ahead of life, right?

"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," a GSA engineer wrote the International Code Council. "The biggest question that needs to be answered is at what economist cost to society." Property ahead of life, no?

What’s more, the tycoons don’t want requirements for glow-in-the-dark markings on stairs to facilitate building evacuations. Such measures helped save countless lives during 9/11. But better to collect millions in rent money to the max, right? The husband of a friend of mine fled the World Trade Center, destroyed by the 9/11 terrorists who flew jetliners into it. I wonder what he’d think of the tycoons’ pushback against safety regulations. Would the glow-in-the-dark markings add that much cost to new buildings?

In The Solomon Scandals, hundreds die in an IRS-occupied building that had narrow halls, cramped stairwells and inadequate fireproofing for the steel columns holding it up. Two construction experts, Gordon Batson of Clarkson University and M. Kevin Parfitt of Penn State, vetted Scandals’ collapse-related aspects.

A Watergate Pulitzer Prize winner and another distinguished journalist, in blurbs for Scandals, note the never-ending corruption in Washington. I don’t know if there are direct or indirect quid pro quos in fire safety matters, but if nothing else, I wonder if rental costs are the only reason why GSA would bizarrely oppose the NIST-recommended precautions. Lurita Doan, GSA administrator, shown here, recently resigned amid conflict-of-interest accusations and other alleged improprieties, though I doubt there’s a safety-related connection here. Housed in the same building that was the setting for the oil-related Teapot Dome Scandals, GSA for decades has been regarded as a dumping ground for pliable political hacks despite the existence of many stellar civil servants there as well.

Scandals will appear as an e-book and trade paperback later this year from Twilight Times and will come just ahead of another forthcoming D.C. newspaper novel, by Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post. Although fiction, Scandals is inspired by my newspaper stories picked up by ABC and NBC evening news, including the disclosure that a "blind trust" of Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff had invested secretly and illegally in a GSA-leased building occupied by the Central Intelligence Agency. You bet: nonDRMed ePub will be among Scandals’ format options. Thank you, NIST, and best of luck in the fire safety fight!