A few more Times articles...
Jun. 28th, 2005 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on redesigning the proposed park under the Brooklyn Bridge to be skateboarding friendly.
Under a Bridge, and on Top of the World
By JUSTIN PORTER
For decades, nobody wanted the space except the skateboarders.
Underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a set of brick ramps buttress an off ramp and the bridge itself. Skaters called them the Brooklyn Banks, and for years came from all around the world to skate there.
It wasn't a pretty spot, and the combination of broken bottles and urine meant that skaters who fell risked nasty infections. But, for the most part, skaters there did not have to worry about being arrested or chased away. Then one day last November, the Brooklyn Banks were off limits. City officials had decided that the spot could be lovely and green. So they fenced off the area to begin construction of a park.
Skateboarders consider New York one of the world's best cities for their sport. Midtown has courtyards of office towers, often adorned with marble benches and expanses of steps. Downtown offers the Brooklyn Banks and Battery Park. In between they love traveling in the streets themselves, cruising along at high speeds, in between cars and along sidewalks.
But Steve Rodriguez, 34, who has been a skateboarder in New York since 1983 and is the founder of a company that designs decks, the board part of skateboards, was afraid that the city's skaters were about to lose a key location - a place where they could skate without harassment.
After some digging, he learned that Bob Redmond, the Parks Department's director of capital projects for Manhattan, was in charge and that the city was interested in redesigning at least part of the park with skateboarders in mind.
"Since this was so popular with the skateboarders," Mr. Redmond said, "we felt that that was a good activity at this location."
That doesn't mean that everyone would welcome it. When Mr. Rodriguez spoke with some retired people living in the area, he discovered that they feared that "skateboard" meant "ugly."
"Basically when nonskaters think of skateboard parks, they think of big ramps as being where skateboarders want to skate," said Mr. Rodriguez. "This is what they see on TV, so they think if a skate park gets built here there will be 13-foot-high vert ramps, and those don't look too nice."
Mr. Rodriguez was able to reassure both the residents and the Parks Department officials that the existing planters and stairs could make great skating obstacles. But sensing there was a need for his expertise, he volunteered his services to the Parks Department as a skateboard consultant. The department happily accepted.
The end result, which Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe calls a "skateboard-friendly park," is being shaped so that skaters can roll around the planters and perimeter. And the city has removed some benches and planters from the design so that more of the bridge's brick ramps are accessible. The new park should open in late July.
Mr. Rodriguez is all the more delighted with the results because the city has already created skate parks that, in his opinion, don't work: the Millennium Skate Park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the Hudson River Park skate park, on the promenade just above Canal Street.
To understand why he thinks so, it is necessary to understand something about skate park design. They feature two types of obstacles: transition and street. Transition obstacles are ramps built specifically for skateboarding, the most common being the half-pipe or vert ramp, so called because the two or three feet near the top of the ramp are completely vertical. Street obstacles are objects intended for uses other than skateboarding - like benches, steps and handrails - or their facsimiles in skate parks. Placement is key: too much space between obstacles means that skaters can't build up a flow; too little does not give them enough time to set up the next trick.
At Hudson River Park's skate park, half of the space was taken to build a bowl, shaped like the empty swimming pools that inspired ramp skating. But for safety reasons only one person at a time can use a bowl. The Millennium Skatepark was designed as a basin, with street obstacles surrounded by ramps. Mr. Rodriguez said that he would have preferred a park that is more like the streets.
A skate park that more closely resembles Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, for instance.
That park has pavement that is level, clean and smooth: perfect for skateboarding. And because of the efforts of David Mims and Kristen Yaccarino, a husband-and-wife team who run Autumn skateboard shop on East 9th Street, skaters can use the park and portable obstacles without being stopped by the police.
This week, Charles Lamb wove his skateboard toward a round metal rail that sits a foot above the ground in Tompkins Square. A second before he reached the rail, he jumped and landed on it, traveling its length with a Feeble Grind, a trick in which the back of the skateboard is on the rail and front hangs over the side.
"Growing up in New York, I didn't have a ramp or a skate park," said Mr. Lamb, in his mid-20's. "Now that they're here all of a sudden, I could still skate them, but I'd rather skate something like this," he said, indicating a wooden box with a metal edge that mimics a ledge or a bench, and a long, low bar, which mimics the shape of a handrail.
With skaters like Mr. Lamb in mind, Ellen Epstein of Vollmer Associates, a landscape architect working on the new park, is using Mr. Rodriguez's advice to create what she has dubbed a "skate feature," rather than a skate park, with the goal of creating a space that both skaters and nonskaters can enjoy.
Maria Zatuchney has been a resident of Southbridge Tower, three blocks from the Brooklyn Banks, for over 10 years. She has noticed this year that skateboarders, now unable to go to the banks, have been skating near her apartment.
"They weren't bothering the residents," said Ms. Zatuchney on Wednesday. "It's just that they were destroying the property. They should make a park for them."
The intention is that those who go to the park to simply sit will not be bothered by the skaters, since there will be areas that skateboarders can't use.
Mr. Rodriguez is happy with the dual-use design. To him, parks marked "skaters here" take the fun out of it: the thrill of the hunt for a good location, and the challenge of innovation, as skateboarders learn to adapt their skills to unfamiliar ground.
"A skate park kind of makes it just like everywhere else," he said. "That would mean that you wouldn't have to go anywhere to discover stuff."
One on redesigning tall buildings.
Time for Drastic Changes in Tall Buildings? Experts Disagree
By ERIC LIPTON and JIM DWYER
The day had been one of utter confusion, panic, even death. Terrorists had attacked the largest buildings in New York. And for months afterward, a task force of senior government officials met to reflect on the event, and to study how to make tall buildings safer. In the end, they produced a document calling for fundamental change in how they are built and operated.
The date of their report was Feb. 22, 1995, two years to the week after the first attack on the World Trade Center. More than six years later, on the morning of the next attack, very few of the recommendations had been put into effect. "It just didn't happen," said Patricia Lancaster, now the city buildings commissioner.
Yesterday, a federal agency released a 10,000-page draft final report on the collapse of the World Trade Center, including a set of recommendations for fundamental changes in the next generation of skyscrapers, and for emergency response. Having been struck twice, New York City has already passed Local Law 26, which anticipates and surpasses many of the federal recommendations. But faced with opposition from the real estate industry, the city has not required wider staircases.
Elsewhere, some of the early reactions to the new recommendations, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recall the history, if not the fate, of the reform effort after the 1993 attacks. Many structural engineers argue that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were so unusual that they should not propel drastic change.
"Tall buildings are extremely safe today, one of the safest places you can be," said W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer who led an earlier investigation into the World Trade Center attack, as well as an inquiry into the bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City.
He and William F. Baker, a structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, said that as a result, changes in building codes will likely be modest. "I expect it will be more a case of refinements than wholesale changes," Mr. Baker said.
Leaders of the National Institute of Standards and Technology say that they have an ambitious program of meetings with building code experts and industry officials to push for changes that they believe will improve the safety of buildings faced not only with terrorist attacks, but also more routine hazards like earthquakes, fires, and hurricanes. The agency plans to hold a conference in September on how the building industry can reduce the risk.
"We already have begun working with the organizations that will be responsible for turning the recommendations into action," said Hratch Semerjian, the acting director of the institute.
Nationally, between 1989 and 1999, no more than five civilians were killed in 6,900 reported high-rise office building fires, according to statistics complied by the National Fire Protection Association. Those numbers - which do not include the attacks at the World Trade Center - are not large enough to produce wide-scale change in building codes, several engineers said.
"You can do anything you want, but you can't change a number that is already extremely low," Dr. Corley said.
In presenting the findings yesterday, S. Shyam Sunder, who led the federal investigation, rejected suggestions that the events at the trade center were too rare to provide useful lessons for other skyscrapers. The investigation used two approaches to study risks, he said. One was based on historical records. The second was "scenario driven," an effort to anticipate unusual events that could cause serious injury or death.
Dr. Sunder said that fully equipped firefighters - carrying nearly 100 pounds of gear up stairs - begin to reach their physiological limits about the 15th or 20th floor, and that it takes about two minutes to climb per floor. For people on the 60th floor of a building that has lost power, Dr. Sunder said, "help is actually a few hours away. We did not look at other buildings, but we are very confident in our recommendations."
Historically, major revisions in building codes have often followed catastrophes or spectacular fires, such as the Chicago Iroquois Theater fire in 1903, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York in 1911, two major skyscraper fires in New York City in the early 1970's, and a deadly fire in 1980 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. All told, hundreds of people died in those fires. Even so, the debate over code changes often drags on for years, as groups with competing interests attempt to influence the process, debating costs and benefits.
Jonathan Barnett, a professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Center for Fire Safety Studies, said that many recommendations the standards institute has made would require extensive research before code standards could be drafted.
That research would cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, far more than the $16 million that the institute invested in the study. "There will be no significant change unless Congress throws money at this," he said. "It is not going to come from the private sector."
Ms. Lancaster, of the New York Department of Buildings, cited the example of using glow-in-the-dark paint in staircases, a feature of the trade center stairs that a number of people said had been helpful in their evacuation, and which the city recently required for all tall buildings. Deciding where and how much of the paint should be applied took nearly two years, Ms. Lancaster said.
Ms. Lancaster said that the city was determined not to let reform efforts fall into a bureaucratic torpor, and that it had already adopted a number of the recommendations called for by the federal inquiry. These include such changes as reinforced walls for staircases and elevators, more sprinklers, smoke control measures, and inspection of fireproofing. The question of expanding the width of staircases continues to be debated in New York because of cost concerns.
Dr. Corley, Mr. Baker and Dr. Barnett each agreed that many of the recommendations could work their way into model codes adopted by organizations like the National Fire Protection Association and the International Code Council, which local and state governments use as templates for their own codes.
Jack Murphy, an adviser to the National Fire Protection Association on high-rise safety, said that firefighters could provide powerful voices on the need for change, but that they are rarely involved.
The new standards will likely result in an immediate adjustment in the development of certain major skyscrapers, if they have not already been made. Mr. Baker, for example, is working on the structural design for the Trump Tower in Chicago. The Freedom Tower, which is to replace the World Trade Center, is also likely to integrate many of the recommendations, the engineers predicted.
The changes Mr. Baker is incorporating into these kinds of buildings include wider stairwells that have more robust walls, and refuge areas for the disabled to await assistance or for tired tenants to rest during an evacuation. He also is designing these towers with stronger connections between columns and beams, addressing one recommendation in yesterday's report.
"What we might do on a high-profile building or a building with special tenants is one thing," Mr. Baker said. "But if you want to do that in all tall buildings, I am not sure that is appropriate."
One on the Pentagon's database.
16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More
By DAMIEN CAVE
The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said.
Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist.
"Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na�ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you."
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent.
"It's far more serious if the database had been established prior to Privacy Act notice," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It's end-running the act by putting it into private hands and subverting the act by creating a public database without public notice."
The issue of the database has emerged as the Army and, to a lesser extent, the Marines, struggle to meet recruitment goals to replenish the ranks of the all-volunteer services. The Web site for the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research Studies division, which manages recruiting research and marketing for all four branches of the military, describes the database as "arguably the largest repository of 16-to-25-year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records." It is managed by BeNOW Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., a marketing company that uses personal data to concentrate on customers.
The database includes the names of more than 3.1 million graduating seniors, a list bought by the Pentagon, as well as the names of 4.7 million college students, Pentagon records show. Drawing information from motor vehicle records, Selective Service registrations and private vendors, it includes a variety of personal information, including grades, height, weight and Social Security numbers.
The information is used primarily for direct-mail campaigns and to help the military weed out people who would not be eligible. It is also sent monthly to the recruiting command, said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, and could be shared with local recruiters.
Recruiters have compiled and used similar data for decades, according to interviews with former military officials. But this database is the most extensive centralized collection of such records. The information is continually being merged for focused marketing.
"Halfway through 2004," said a briefing on the program in February that appears on a Pentagon Web site, "we started overlaying ethnicity codes and telephone numbers."
Mr. Chu said the information, particularly Social Security numbers, was closely guarded and had not been shared with other agencies.
For some parents, any information gathered by the military covertly amounts to an intrusion.
"There is no buffer zone," said Sandra Lowe of Sonoma, Calif., who is a mother of four, including two teenage boys. "It's a direct shot to someone's child without consent from a parent. If you were to come on campus and wanted to take a picture of a child, you have to get a release - just to take a picture. This is a lot more than that."
Under a Bridge, and on Top of the World
By JUSTIN PORTER
For decades, nobody wanted the space except the skateboarders.
Underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a set of brick ramps buttress an off ramp and the bridge itself. Skaters called them the Brooklyn Banks, and for years came from all around the world to skate there.
It wasn't a pretty spot, and the combination of broken bottles and urine meant that skaters who fell risked nasty infections. But, for the most part, skaters there did not have to worry about being arrested or chased away. Then one day last November, the Brooklyn Banks were off limits. City officials had decided that the spot could be lovely and green. So they fenced off the area to begin construction of a park.
Skateboarders consider New York one of the world's best cities for their sport. Midtown has courtyards of office towers, often adorned with marble benches and expanses of steps. Downtown offers the Brooklyn Banks and Battery Park. In between they love traveling in the streets themselves, cruising along at high speeds, in between cars and along sidewalks.
But Steve Rodriguez, 34, who has been a skateboarder in New York since 1983 and is the founder of a company that designs decks, the board part of skateboards, was afraid that the city's skaters were about to lose a key location - a place where they could skate without harassment.
After some digging, he learned that Bob Redmond, the Parks Department's director of capital projects for Manhattan, was in charge and that the city was interested in redesigning at least part of the park with skateboarders in mind.
"Since this was so popular with the skateboarders," Mr. Redmond said, "we felt that that was a good activity at this location."
That doesn't mean that everyone would welcome it. When Mr. Rodriguez spoke with some retired people living in the area, he discovered that they feared that "skateboard" meant "ugly."
"Basically when nonskaters think of skateboard parks, they think of big ramps as being where skateboarders want to skate," said Mr. Rodriguez. "This is what they see on TV, so they think if a skate park gets built here there will be 13-foot-high vert ramps, and those don't look too nice."
Mr. Rodriguez was able to reassure both the residents and the Parks Department officials that the existing planters and stairs could make great skating obstacles. But sensing there was a need for his expertise, he volunteered his services to the Parks Department as a skateboard consultant. The department happily accepted.
The end result, which Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe calls a "skateboard-friendly park," is being shaped so that skaters can roll around the planters and perimeter. And the city has removed some benches and planters from the design so that more of the bridge's brick ramps are accessible. The new park should open in late July.
Mr. Rodriguez is all the more delighted with the results because the city has already created skate parks that, in his opinion, don't work: the Millennium Skate Park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the Hudson River Park skate park, on the promenade just above Canal Street.
To understand why he thinks so, it is necessary to understand something about skate park design. They feature two types of obstacles: transition and street. Transition obstacles are ramps built specifically for skateboarding, the most common being the half-pipe or vert ramp, so called because the two or three feet near the top of the ramp are completely vertical. Street obstacles are objects intended for uses other than skateboarding - like benches, steps and handrails - or their facsimiles in skate parks. Placement is key: too much space between obstacles means that skaters can't build up a flow; too little does not give them enough time to set up the next trick.
At Hudson River Park's skate park, half of the space was taken to build a bowl, shaped like the empty swimming pools that inspired ramp skating. But for safety reasons only one person at a time can use a bowl. The Millennium Skatepark was designed as a basin, with street obstacles surrounded by ramps. Mr. Rodriguez said that he would have preferred a park that is more like the streets.
A skate park that more closely resembles Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, for instance.
That park has pavement that is level, clean and smooth: perfect for skateboarding. And because of the efforts of David Mims and Kristen Yaccarino, a husband-and-wife team who run Autumn skateboard shop on East 9th Street, skaters can use the park and portable obstacles without being stopped by the police.
This week, Charles Lamb wove his skateboard toward a round metal rail that sits a foot above the ground in Tompkins Square. A second before he reached the rail, he jumped and landed on it, traveling its length with a Feeble Grind, a trick in which the back of the skateboard is on the rail and front hangs over the side.
"Growing up in New York, I didn't have a ramp or a skate park," said Mr. Lamb, in his mid-20's. "Now that they're here all of a sudden, I could still skate them, but I'd rather skate something like this," he said, indicating a wooden box with a metal edge that mimics a ledge or a bench, and a long, low bar, which mimics the shape of a handrail.
With skaters like Mr. Lamb in mind, Ellen Epstein of Vollmer Associates, a landscape architect working on the new park, is using Mr. Rodriguez's advice to create what she has dubbed a "skate feature," rather than a skate park, with the goal of creating a space that both skaters and nonskaters can enjoy.
Maria Zatuchney has been a resident of Southbridge Tower, three blocks from the Brooklyn Banks, for over 10 years. She has noticed this year that skateboarders, now unable to go to the banks, have been skating near her apartment.
"They weren't bothering the residents," said Ms. Zatuchney on Wednesday. "It's just that they were destroying the property. They should make a park for them."
The intention is that those who go to the park to simply sit will not be bothered by the skaters, since there will be areas that skateboarders can't use.
Mr. Rodriguez is happy with the dual-use design. To him, parks marked "skaters here" take the fun out of it: the thrill of the hunt for a good location, and the challenge of innovation, as skateboarders learn to adapt their skills to unfamiliar ground.
"A skate park kind of makes it just like everywhere else," he said. "That would mean that you wouldn't have to go anywhere to discover stuff."
One on redesigning tall buildings.
Time for Drastic Changes in Tall Buildings? Experts Disagree
By ERIC LIPTON and JIM DWYER
The day had been one of utter confusion, panic, even death. Terrorists had attacked the largest buildings in New York. And for months afterward, a task force of senior government officials met to reflect on the event, and to study how to make tall buildings safer. In the end, they produced a document calling for fundamental change in how they are built and operated.
The date of their report was Feb. 22, 1995, two years to the week after the first attack on the World Trade Center. More than six years later, on the morning of the next attack, very few of the recommendations had been put into effect. "It just didn't happen," said Patricia Lancaster, now the city buildings commissioner.
Yesterday, a federal agency released a 10,000-page draft final report on the collapse of the World Trade Center, including a set of recommendations for fundamental changes in the next generation of skyscrapers, and for emergency response. Having been struck twice, New York City has already passed Local Law 26, which anticipates and surpasses many of the federal recommendations. But faced with opposition from the real estate industry, the city has not required wider staircases.
Elsewhere, some of the early reactions to the new recommendations, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recall the history, if not the fate, of the reform effort after the 1993 attacks. Many structural engineers argue that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were so unusual that they should not propel drastic change.
"Tall buildings are extremely safe today, one of the safest places you can be," said W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer who led an earlier investigation into the World Trade Center attack, as well as an inquiry into the bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City.
He and William F. Baker, a structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, said that as a result, changes in building codes will likely be modest. "I expect it will be more a case of refinements than wholesale changes," Mr. Baker said.
Leaders of the National Institute of Standards and Technology say that they have an ambitious program of meetings with building code experts and industry officials to push for changes that they believe will improve the safety of buildings faced not only with terrorist attacks, but also more routine hazards like earthquakes, fires, and hurricanes. The agency plans to hold a conference in September on how the building industry can reduce the risk.
"We already have begun working with the organizations that will be responsible for turning the recommendations into action," said Hratch Semerjian, the acting director of the institute.
Nationally, between 1989 and 1999, no more than five civilians were killed in 6,900 reported high-rise office building fires, according to statistics complied by the National Fire Protection Association. Those numbers - which do not include the attacks at the World Trade Center - are not large enough to produce wide-scale change in building codes, several engineers said.
"You can do anything you want, but you can't change a number that is already extremely low," Dr. Corley said.
In presenting the findings yesterday, S. Shyam Sunder, who led the federal investigation, rejected suggestions that the events at the trade center were too rare to provide useful lessons for other skyscrapers. The investigation used two approaches to study risks, he said. One was based on historical records. The second was "scenario driven," an effort to anticipate unusual events that could cause serious injury or death.
Dr. Sunder said that fully equipped firefighters - carrying nearly 100 pounds of gear up stairs - begin to reach their physiological limits about the 15th or 20th floor, and that it takes about two minutes to climb per floor. For people on the 60th floor of a building that has lost power, Dr. Sunder said, "help is actually a few hours away. We did not look at other buildings, but we are very confident in our recommendations."
Historically, major revisions in building codes have often followed catastrophes or spectacular fires, such as the Chicago Iroquois Theater fire in 1903, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York in 1911, two major skyscraper fires in New York City in the early 1970's, and a deadly fire in 1980 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. All told, hundreds of people died in those fires. Even so, the debate over code changes often drags on for years, as groups with competing interests attempt to influence the process, debating costs and benefits.
Jonathan Barnett, a professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Center for Fire Safety Studies, said that many recommendations the standards institute has made would require extensive research before code standards could be drafted.
That research would cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, far more than the $16 million that the institute invested in the study. "There will be no significant change unless Congress throws money at this," he said. "It is not going to come from the private sector."
Ms. Lancaster, of the New York Department of Buildings, cited the example of using glow-in-the-dark paint in staircases, a feature of the trade center stairs that a number of people said had been helpful in their evacuation, and which the city recently required for all tall buildings. Deciding where and how much of the paint should be applied took nearly two years, Ms. Lancaster said.
Ms. Lancaster said that the city was determined not to let reform efforts fall into a bureaucratic torpor, and that it had already adopted a number of the recommendations called for by the federal inquiry. These include such changes as reinforced walls for staircases and elevators, more sprinklers, smoke control measures, and inspection of fireproofing. The question of expanding the width of staircases continues to be debated in New York because of cost concerns.
Dr. Corley, Mr. Baker and Dr. Barnett each agreed that many of the recommendations could work their way into model codes adopted by organizations like the National Fire Protection Association and the International Code Council, which local and state governments use as templates for their own codes.
Jack Murphy, an adviser to the National Fire Protection Association on high-rise safety, said that firefighters could provide powerful voices on the need for change, but that they are rarely involved.
The new standards will likely result in an immediate adjustment in the development of certain major skyscrapers, if they have not already been made. Mr. Baker, for example, is working on the structural design for the Trump Tower in Chicago. The Freedom Tower, which is to replace the World Trade Center, is also likely to integrate many of the recommendations, the engineers predicted.
The changes Mr. Baker is incorporating into these kinds of buildings include wider stairwells that have more robust walls, and refuge areas for the disabled to await assistance or for tired tenants to rest during an evacuation. He also is designing these towers with stronger connections between columns and beams, addressing one recommendation in yesterday's report.
"What we might do on a high-profile building or a building with special tenants is one thing," Mr. Baker said. "But if you want to do that in all tall buildings, I am not sure that is appropriate."
One on the Pentagon's database.
16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More
By DAMIEN CAVE
The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created.
David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said.
Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist.
"Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na�ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you."
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent.
"It's far more serious if the database had been established prior to Privacy Act notice," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It's end-running the act by putting it into private hands and subverting the act by creating a public database without public notice."
The issue of the database has emerged as the Army and, to a lesser extent, the Marines, struggle to meet recruitment goals to replenish the ranks of the all-volunteer services. The Web site for the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research Studies division, which manages recruiting research and marketing for all four branches of the military, describes the database as "arguably the largest repository of 16-to-25-year-old youth data in the country, containing roughly 30 million records." It is managed by BeNOW Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., a marketing company that uses personal data to concentrate on customers.
The database includes the names of more than 3.1 million graduating seniors, a list bought by the Pentagon, as well as the names of 4.7 million college students, Pentagon records show. Drawing information from motor vehicle records, Selective Service registrations and private vendors, it includes a variety of personal information, including grades, height, weight and Social Security numbers.
The information is used primarily for direct-mail campaigns and to help the military weed out people who would not be eligible. It is also sent monthly to the recruiting command, said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, and could be shared with local recruiters.
Recruiters have compiled and used similar data for decades, according to interviews with former military officials. But this database is the most extensive centralized collection of such records. The information is continually being merged for focused marketing.
"Halfway through 2004," said a briefing on the program in February that appears on a Pentagon Web site, "we started overlaying ethnicity codes and telephone numbers."
Mr. Chu said the information, particularly Social Security numbers, was closely guarded and had not been shared with other agencies.
For some parents, any information gathered by the military covertly amounts to an intrusion.
"There is no buffer zone," said Sandra Lowe of Sonoma, Calif., who is a mother of four, including two teenage boys. "It's a direct shot to someone's child without consent from a parent. If you were to come on campus and wanted to take a picture of a child, you have to get a release - just to take a picture. This is a lot more than that."
