Results tagged “emergencymanagementagency”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that President Bush had signed a "major disaster declaration" for Queens on August 8, the day the weather (including a tornado in Brooklyn and Staten Island) caused much of the city to come to a standstill. This means that Queens residents and business owners will be able to apply for disaster relief.

Freedom Tower's redesign is apparently something the NYPD can okay. The NYPD's counterterrorism head told the City Council, "We have positioned ourselves exactly where we should be to ensure that the Freedom Tower is the beautiful, elegant, secure, safe, robustly designed project that we all want it to be." Somehow, Gothamist doubts that it'll be a beautiful and elegant building that *we* all want it to be, but after reading yesterday's NY Times story about the rebuilding, we're okay with "secure, safe, robustly designed." Mainly, because of this quote:

In publicly available reports, [Defense Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Institute of Architects] advise that attention-getting architectural symbols are prime targets and should be located far from potential vehicle-borne bombs; glass facades can be lethal in a blast; train stations and underground garages are especially vulnerable to attack; and spacious, column-free interiors under other structures may be liable to collapse.

And there's a great "scare people to the core" graphic from with diagrams of how big an explosion from bombs of different sizes would be - it's a fascinating and frightening look at terrorism, engineering and public safety. Anyway, with the NYPD proclaiming that Freedom Tower will be the "safest big building" in NYC, should people working and/or living in other big buildings (any midtown skyscrapers, for instance) feel crappy?