I thought this was an interesting article in today’s NY Times about how NYC is rewriting their all their codes. I was nervous about posting such a long article but if I just posted the link you all would have to register (for those who are not), and that can be a pain. Hope you all find some interest.
City Reshaping Building Codes to U.S. Model
May 17, 2004
New York City has embarked on the most comprehensive rewriting of its building, fire, plumbing and electrical codes since they were first adopted more than a century ago.
This quiet revolution will alter the city’s inner landscape, from life-and-death details like fire sprinklers and the lighting in emergency stairways to mundane matters like allowing homeowners to save money by using plastic pipes for toilets and sinks.
The revisions – the most important of which are now being drafted behind closed doors by 13 committees of engineers, safety experts and real estate developers appointed by the Bloomberg administration – are not expected to make a radical difference in the way buildings are constructed. But because the codes have effectively been the city’s DNA, shaping its appearance and its workings, the changes are likely to affect all the places in which New Yorkers live and work in myriad ways, big and small.
Stairwells in new high-rise buildings would have to be pressurized to keep them from becoming chimneys during a fire, under one possible change, while another – opposed by many families of 9/11 victims – would sharply reduce the amount of fireproofing required in many buildings. New precautions against earthquake damage could force developers in certain parts of the city where the soil is soft to build stronger, more expensive structures.
At bottom, though, the most surprising change is that New York is abandoning many of the intricate restrictions, carefully tailored to its quirks and jealously defended over the decades, that have made its codes a Byzantine patchwork and have made the city one of the most difficult and expensive in which to put up a building. The city, in fact, is tossing out all of those codes, adopting standard codes in effect across the nation, then adding back pieces of the old rules as needed. And those additions have become the crux of sometimes fierce debate.
“This is a landmark turning point in the city’s history as far as codes go,†said Glenn P. Corbett, an assistant professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the committee reviewing fire-protection rules. “New York City is preparing to give up its own homegrown codes, which are too expensive to maintain on our own and have left us way behind the rest of the country.â€
The city’s fire code would be drastically revised, with potential consequences for everything from how merchandise is stacked in warehouse-style stores to how much propane a hot dog vendor can store on his cart.
New kitchens will be required to have special electrical outlets to prevent electrocution, under a provision already passed into law. The way underground plumbing is laid out for new buildings may change, and even some urinals may look different.
The choices now being made by the committees, which require the approval of the City Council and the mayor, will be felt in New Yorkers’ pocketbooks, both as savings and as new costs. They could influence how many lives are lost each year to fires and other calamities, and may even affect how many people are killed or injured the next time a terrorist strikes.
The city has already approved a new electrical code, which went into effect last year. The committees are expected to come up with recommendations for the building and plumbing codes in June, and a new fire code in the next year to 18 months.
So far, the effort has played out largely in closed meetings of about 400 panel members, as the Bloomberg administration tries to address disagreements early and in private. In interviews, committee members and others involved in the process said many of those disputes have come down to a clash between two typically antithetical goals: cutting building costs and increasing safety.
The Impact of 9/11
The move to revise the city’s ground rules for building construction and maintenance began two years ago, prompted by a nationwide push to simplify and standardize building codes and to recognize new materials and technologies.
Many parts of these uniform codes, like the International Building Code and the International Fire Code, are less stringent and less costly than New York’s. Adopting a so-called model code is expected to save New York builders tens of millions of dollars, from the town house where bathrooms will cost hundreds less because plastic pipe can be used instead of copper or brass, to the department store that state officials say now costs about $1.75 million less, on average, to build elsewhere in the state since Albany adopted the International Building Code in 2002.
Yet the other big thrust behind the city’s effort came after Sept. 11, 2001, when safety experts and victims’ families began a crusade to make New York’s fire and building codes more stringent. An April 2002 explosion in a Chelsea sign shop that injured 36 people added to the urgency; federal investigators concluded that the fire code was so out of date that it did not prohibit the mixing of incompatible chemicals.
Already, powerful groups representing both camps – developers and city officials who want to lower building costs and those who say there is no better time to tighten safety measures – are lobbying to ensure that their views prevail. And the process has become politicized in even more complex ways because of all the other interests represented on the 13 committees: those of unions, architects, environmentalists, disabled people and advocates for the construction of low- and moderate-income housing.
Most everyone involved agrees that the old codes are too unwieldy and expensive to keep up to date. But many people want to retain some of their idiosyncratic provisions, which they say embody the lessons learned in an unusually dense, vertical city that little resembles the rest of the nation.
“The code reflects the experience that has been accumulated in New York City over a century,†said W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer who led a federal investigation into the World Trade Center collapse. “It has codified those things that are needed to provide the safety the public expects.â€
But as the panels weigh which parts of the old code to preserve, through hundreds of proposed amendments, some members are concerned that an overreaction to 9/11 may compromise the effort to streamline and modernize the codes.
“It can’t be knee-jerk, or we’ll have to build bunkers,†said the city’s buildings commissioner, Patricia J. Lancaster, an architect whose agency initiated the code revision. “We can’t do that, or people won’t come. So it’s up to us to balance safety and economic development.â€
Reshaping New York
Restrictions on building materials and techniques go back to New York’s earliest days; in 1648, the Dutch ordered the removal of wooden chimneys to reduce fire hazards. But the city’s modern fire and building codes were not written until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after devastating fires like the 1911 blaze at the Triangle shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village, which killed 146 workers.
Major code revisions were made in the years since, most notably in 1937 and 1968, incorporating more radical changes than are now contemplated – rules that reshaped New York, from its water towers and fretwork of fire escapes to the creation of the “postwar†building, with its lighter-weight, less expensive walls and floors.
But never has New York rewritten all of its basic regulations on buildings at the same time. Once the model codes are adopted, they will be updated every couple of years based on advice from the national experts who wrote the model codes.
The most critical, and intensely debated, aspects of any building code are those meant to save lives. Given the enormous loss of life at the World Trade Center, much of the focus is now on finding ways to allow more people to quickly and safely evacuate buildings.
The Buildings Department, not wanting to wait until the code revision is completed, has asked the City Council to require that exit doors and stairs in all high-rise office buildings have photo luminescent markings and backup power for lights so that workers are not caught in the dark as they are trying to get out. More robust, impact-resistant walls would also have to be built into the stairwells of new buildings, to prevent all exits from being cut off in an explosion.
Yet one of the most disputed parts of the International Building Code would allow developers of many new buildings to use less fireproofing than is now required – a change that would save developers considerable sums of money. The rationale is that if a new building must have sprinklers, as most tall office buildings in New York City are now required to, it should not need as much fireproofing.
“Obviously the New York City code offers more protection,†said Roland W. Hall, government relations manager for the International Code Council, a Virginia-based nonprofit group established by regional code-writing associations a decade ago to create a single national standard for building, fire, electrical and plumbing codes. “The question people have to decide is if it is appropriate to provide that additional margin. In our organization’s opinion, the slightly lesser standard provides adequate protection for life safety.â€
Others say it is essential to have overlapping safety features, or what firefighters call a “belts and suspenders†strategy, particularly because sprinklers have sometimes failed. They point out that the standard for fireproofing has already been rolled back since the 1930’s from a requirement that structural columns in high-rises, for instance, withstand fire for four hours to the current rule that they stay strong for two. The model code would keep that threshold in tall buildings, but if it is not amended by the city, it would reduce fire-resistance requirements for corridors and walls separating tenants.
“That is, like, the dumbest thing I have ever heard,†said Monica Gabrielle, co-chairwoman of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, a group formed after the trade center collapse, in which her husband, Richard, was killed. “If nothing else, Sept. 11th showed us you need more time to get out, not less time.â€
A Focus on Safety
The debate over safety extends even to matters like the array of new construction materials, including plastic pipe, that the national codes allow. Just as garbage disposals were banned in New York City until 1997 for environmental reasons, plastic pipe, used nationwide for 30 years or so, has been forbidden in New York buildings taller than three stories.
Some firefighters point out that the pipe gives off toxic fumes when it burns, while the local plumbers’ union says that glues used to assemble it might pose a health hazard. But Julius A. Ballanco, an engineer and code consultant, countered at one Buildings Department hearing that the pipe was safe and that its opponents’ underlying worry was that “plastic pipe typically takes less labor to install and is often less costly.â€
Another proposed code change would force developers to hire an additional structural engineering firm to provide a second opinion for buildings with particularly innovative designs. If the International Fire Code is adopted in its entirety, the storage and handling of chemicals will be far more restricted.
But the changes will go far beyond matters of safety. Environmental groups like Earth Pledge want the new code to include provisions that explicitly permit so-called green roofs, rooftops covered with dirt or vegetation that reduce a building’s energy consumption by lowering cooling costs. One manufacturer is trying to get permission for buildings to install new waterless urinals that it says would each save an estimated 40,000 gallons of water per year by using an oil-and-alcohol-based drainage system.
Many building owners and developers on the committees support a handful of code changes that would increase their expenses, like requiring sprinklers in the 200 to 400 high-rise office buildings that do not have them. But they are also looking for savings in other areas.
“We are not ashamed to say we are interested in the dollar,†said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “One of the reasons we have a hard time finding commercial tenants and building affordable housing is the high cost of doing construction. And that is clearly tied in part to the current code.â€
To test just what cost differences the new codes might make, city officials are studying building projects now in progress to compare prices under the old and model codes, said Ms. Lancaster, the buildings commissioner. If a certain part of the model code turns out to be significantly costlier, she said, the city will reconsider that provision.
Despite the focus on the bottom line, she said, “I am committed to ensuring that the new code is as safe or safer than the code today.â€
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/nyregion/17CODE.html?ex=1085805257&ei=1&en=197ccda090ef9822
