"Building safety is no accident."

When NCSBCS and the model building code organizations used this theme to establish National Building Safety Week 22 years ago, the furthest thing from our minds was the need for a national summit focusing, in part, on how to make buildings in our homeland "safe" from terrorist attacks. Then, terrorism against buildings was solely the concern of the Department of Defense and our State Department’s overseas buildings operations office, not of every building department in every jurisdiction in the United States.

The presentations earlier today have all focused on radical ways in which our "naive" world has changed since the morning of last September 11. We’ve heard from national homeland security leaders and from architects and the federal research community about how 9-11 has transformed various aspects of our lives and the construction industry.

In my remarks this afternoon, I would like to offer a state and local building officials and broader state government officials’ perspective on:

Lessons we’ve learned, what we are currently doing about those lessons, and what is yet to be done.

A. Lessons learned

1. The lessons of first responders – Lack of communication/information.

The scene at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 was like standing at the base of a Tower of Babel. First responders could not communicate with each other because of a lack of interoperable communications equipment. No, as-built designs were available to guide first responders on where they could safely place fire equipment or whether or not they should even attempt to put out the fires that raged so far above the street.

First responders did not have immediate access to architects and engineers with intimate knowledge of the World Trade Center who could have given them the invaluable information that the Towers indeed would come down.

No simulations of the disaster before them could be run to tell them that the Twin Towers indeed would come down and when.

Hampering first responders were confusing and ineffective formal evacuation plans that told some people to stay put inside buildings that were clearly a known target of terrorism.

2. The lessons of building departments in other jurisdictions – mutual aid:

The confusing array of overlapping and duplicative jurisdictional authority over the disaster site made it difficult for some jurisdictions outside of New York City to come to the city’s aid.

Lack of common building codes and construction standards made it difficult for building department personnel, architects, engineers, and private contractors from jurisdictions outside of New York City to offer technical assistance in the immediate- and near-term time frames.

Building, fire, emergency response and disaster planning for large scale events were inadequate. Mutual aid agreements need to be developed, put in place, and trained to, and insurance issues must be handled. Every major jurisdiction is now at risk, not just the safety of their citizens but also the economic viability of their community and perhaps their region as well.

3. The lessons of elected officials – It can happen here.

The security that it "can’t happen here" is gone. The United States is now on the front lines in a war on terrorism. The public is holding elected officials accountable for:

1. Preventing future events from occurring.
2. Reorganizing and coordinating their first responders/building/fire/emergency personnel and construction community to effectively handle future events that may occur in their community or effectively aid neighboring communities if such an event should happen there.

Elected officials also have realized that there isn’t enough money in their jurisdiction’s existing or future budgets to adequately do a and b above, especially since no one can predict when/how/at what targets terrorists will next strike (bioterrorism/dirty nuclear weapons/ bombs on bridges, etc.).

Lastly, to avoid each jurisdiction the costly mistake of having to reinvent the wheel themselves, there must be coordinated national assistance in public policy, technical, and financial resources.

2. What we are doing about those lessons?

To start with, anyone who has been part of a coordinated multi-jurisdictional response to one of several major natural disasters in this nation, from Hurricane Andrew on through the fires around Los Alamos, New Mexico, recognizes that the above lessons are not new.

We’ve known for some time that our ability to effectively respond to large-scale disasters has been hampered by inadequate public/private sector coordination, inadequate communications equipment, overlapping and duplicative regulatory authority even within the same jurisdiction (the stove pipe bureaucracies mentioned this morning by Senator Biden), and the significantly diverse and too often confusing building codes and standards which are adopted and enforced by 44,000 jurisdictions of state and local government.

In the wake of 9-11 we’ve dusted off a few of the reports and studies that offered us recommendations on what we need to do to handle such natural disasters but we have yet to apply those recommendations.

While the White House and Congress sort out funding and structure of homeland security and national strategy, our governors and mayors offices and state and local emergency agencies have gone into overdrive. Governors have appointed their own directors of state homeland security to try and effectively coordinate the responsibilities of diverse state and local governmental agencies with overlapping or conflicting authority over various aspects of disaster preparedness, prevention and response. States are conducting risk assessments and turning to their chief information officers (CIOs) to see how information technology can be effectively applied to assist the state and its localities to end the Tower of Babel at disaster sites through better: coordination between governmental agencies, streamlining the communications process, and forging more effective public and private sector disaster response groups. Examples of such disaster response groups include the Business Roundtable’s CEO Comlink communication network mentioned this morning, and New York City and Buffalo, New York’s Business Network of Emergency Response.

Lastly, the states and local jurisdictions – governors, mayors, county commissioners – in a time of reduced revenues are looking to the White House and Congress for federal policy, technical, and financial support to implement the homeland security strategies they are developing. The states also are looking to federal agencies, like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to conduct research that can lead to making any changes that may prove necessary in the building codes and standards that their jurisdictions adopt and enforce.

At NCSBCS, together with our 32 partners in the "National Alliance for Building Regulatory Reform in the Digital Age," (formed last July) we are working with federal, state, and local governments on several related initiatives which are briefly described in the handouts I have for you this afternoon. Those efforts include:

1. The development of a secure nationwide, state-maintained database of as-built designs, evacuation plans, and contact information so crucial for first responders. System must be interoperable, work across state lines, and be coordinated with other first responder databases like that for health and life safety information for first responders prepared by ComCARE, which is meeting here today as well.
2. The promotion within states and localities of major initiatives to streamline existing building regulatory systems. This effort will facilitate effective disaster preparedness, prevention and response by eliminating areas of regulatory overlap and duplication and code incompatibility within and between jurisdictions.
3. Promoting within the private sector the urgent development of interoperable hardware and software that can be used to facilitate disaster response and streamlined building regulatory systems. NCSBCS now has on its website (www.ncsbcs.org), a listing of such software. Demonstrations of available software and hardware will be a part of the NCSBCS 35^th Annual Conference along with the National Forum on Streamlining and Information Technology October 20-22, 2002, in Louisville, KY).
4. Joining partnerships like "The Infrastructure Security Partnership" (TISP) to coordinate national actions.
5. The NCSBCS Regulatory Affairs Committee is working on sharing information on state homeland security among state and major city building regulatory officials and facilitating more mutual aid agreements between jurisdictions.

C. What is yet to be done?

The national response to 9-11 has evolved over the past nine months from shock and solidarity, to a rush to coordination, to what in some parts of the country now is becoming a near "return to normalcy" coupled with an increasing blame game – "who failed us?"

In some ways, despite summits like this one and the best efforts of our leaders at all levels of government, we find ourselves drifting into a period not unlike the "phony war" in Europe from September 1939 to May 1940 because we have had no new successful terrorist attacks on American soil.

This is a good news/bad news thing. No new attacks is wonderful, but we forget that indeed we are involved in a war. The sense of urgency of action and solidarity, streamlining and reform is losing steam and making us more vulnerable. The reality is that we know it’s not a question of if, but of when, where, and how we will be attacked again.

So what is yet to be done?

Since we are indeed engaged in a war, and a long-term one at that, the answer is everything. Thus far we have only just begun to organize and fund a coordinated national, state and local response to the realities of our post 9-11 world. But we still live at the foot of a Tower of Babel:

Our communications systems must be interoperable. Our first responders must be adequately supported in both equipment and in vital and timely information. Coordination with the private sector must be stronger, and our bureaucracies’ stove pipe agencies must be streamlined and interlinked around a common mission.

We must have adequate research results on the ultimate collapse of the World Trade Center to know what changes should be made to our construction codes, standards and building operations practices. Lastly, even if we had those answers, our nation’s building regulatory system must become less too complex, duplicative, and make use of a single family of compatible comprehensive building and fire codes that state and local jurisdictions can adopt and enforce with limited technical amendments.

In short, we are still unprepared, and it appears at present that each state may be at risk of reinventing the wheel in forging their homeland defense response.

During the American Revolution, one of the biggest problems facing George Washington’s army was the lack of standardization of the weapons being used to fight that war by the diverse array of state/colonial militias. The United States Army worked on that problem for many years, ultimately standardizing weaponry in time to help the Union win the civil war with interoperable and interchangeable parts so union troops could be efficiently supplied and resupplied at less cost with effective firearms.

During the cold war, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – faced and ultimately solved the same problem regarding the weapons they used to defend Western Europe.

Today we are faced with another and perhaps more difficult war, one that demands similar standardization to defend the health, welfare and life safety of our citizens and economic viability of our nation in the global economy.

Interoperable hardware and software, equipment and information for first responders, streamlined building regulatory processes and procedures, and a single coordinated comprehensive family of model national building and fire codes must be among the weapons we use to defend our nation and win this war.

NCSBCS hopes that an essential outcome of this summit is a clear call to our partners in the construction and information technology communities and federal, state and local governments to undertake, fund, and successfully complete such a coordinated nationwide initiative.

To fail to do so will only lead us again and again to stand at the foot of other towers of Babel.

"Building safety is no accident."