Skyscrapers as tombs

ONE OF the famous features of New York City is the Manhattan skyline. The 110-storey twin towers of the World Trade Center were the tallest of its famous skyscrapers, having replaced the Empire State Building in that regard.

But now those towers have crumbled, relics of the terror attack which is changing the course of American history and much else. The architecture of lower Manhattan, in particular, was shaped by the fact that it is a small island. As home to millions in one of the world's busiest commercial and financial centres, there was little lateral space for expansion; so they soared upwards.

This became a feature of modern urban planning used all over the world ­ and carried to dizzy heights in Chicago's Sears Towers and the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Terrorism may change this aspect of future urban design.

Those Manhattan towers could house some 50,000 workers. Emergency evacuation was obviously slow and chaotic and this added to the frightful toll of death. Such majestic towers became the target of the suicidal hijackers who may well have triggered a new kind of world war.

On a much more modest scale some of these factors may well have local relevance ­ in addition of course, to the negative economic and humanitarian spin-offs the tragedy will have on Jamaica. We refer specifically to the pockets of high-rise structures mainly in the capital city.

The recent Portmore Mall fire brought to urgent attention the inadequacies of our firefighting services. In particular, there was some speculation about the capacity to tackle a big fire in any of the multi-storey structures in New Kingston, for example.

There was a famous Hollywood movie of the 1970s dubbed The Towering Inferno, which illustrated a potential threat in high-rise architecture. This could happen here and catch us unprepared. Such a high-rise fire would be minuscule in comparison to last week's major American tragedy. But terror of any dimension can sear the soul; and urban skyscrapers become the tombs of disaster.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner.

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