With the continued shift towards urbanisation – particularly in developing countries and economies, cities are being ever more squeezed for space. In order to overcome the increasing demand for office and residential units, and as land prices continue to increase, cities and developers are building more and more high rise buildings to heights that previously seemed unimaginable.
Quite how you define a high rise building is subjective, but for the purposes for this article, I have included buildings above 100m (328′).
We know that conventional fire fighting equipment (ladders and hoses) are able to reach around about 7 floors (approx 30m), but frankly, trying to identify the number of buildings above 30m is impossible – there are tens of thousands of them!
According to Wiki, If we only include cities with 10 or more, there are 22,791 skyscrapers over 100m around the world! 3 cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen (all in China), have 5,650 alone!
How many of those cities (or individual building owners) do we think, have a coherent rescue plan for the evacuation of multiple personnel and casualties in the event of an emergency where fire escapes are blocked, filled with smoke or are unusable for any number of reasons?
I don’t know the answer, but I would be quite confident in guessing that few, if any, know how they would carry out a high rise evacuation of multiple personnel who are trapped above the level of a fire or major incident.
Multi Person Helicopter Rescue isn’t the only solution, but it’s one that has been proven to work. In 1993 – 8 years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 28 people were rescued from the rooftop of the WTC after a terrorist bomb had been detonated in the parking garage beneath the towers.
Fast forward 8 years, and we know that several helicopters were flying around the top of the WTC after the 9/11 terror attacks before the towers fell.
So we know that roof top helicopter rescues can work in high rise building evacuations – in fact, they’re likely the only realistic option when internal escape routes are inaccessible. Yet few, if any cities have considered the option.
Multi Person Helicopter Rescue from high rise building emergencies is not feasible in every emergency situation. The Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017 is one example where the fire was largely fuelled by external cladding and so spread very rapidly engulfing the upper floors and roof top area. Multi Person Helicopter Rescue from the roof top area would not have been possible in that example. However, in many cases it is!
It is becoming more politically and socially unacceptable for lives to be lost when solutions that could have saved lives already exist.
With over 23,000 high rise buildings above 100m in height around the world, forward thinking risk mitigation and planning is more important than ever.
Multi Person Helicopter Rescue is one such solution.
