Vandalia Ave, 9/11, and the Creation of the USI
Vandalia Avenue Fire
On the morning of December 18, 1998, firefighters in Brooklyn responded to a report of fire at a public housing assisted living facility for elderly residents. According to a report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, by the time they arrived at the 10 story high-rise building at Vandalia Avenue, the fire had been burning for 20 to 30 minutes due to a resident's attempt to put the fire out on their own without calling 911 (NIOSH).
Dispatch informed the members of Ladder Co. 170 that a resident on the 10th floor was trapped in their apartment. Three firefighters, Joseph P. Cavalieri, Christopher M. Bopp, and James E. Bohan ascended to the 10th floor to rescue the resident. Unbeknownst to them, the resident had escaped on their own without informing anyone that they had safely left the building (Yardley).
As the three firefighters desperately searched for the resident, firefighters from Engine Co. 257 attempted to connect a hose to a standpipe on the 10th floor, but were unable due to insulation covering the access valve. As the temperature on the 10th floor increased they were forced to retreat to the 9th floor, where firefighters from Engine Co. 290 had just managed to secure a line to a standpipe. With their fire hose now connected, they made their way back up the stairs to the 10th floor. Upon arrival they found, to their shock, that the entire floor was filled with flames and the heat was so intense that they couldn't enter the hallway.
It was at that point that they received a mayday call from the firefighters of Ladder Co. 170 who were still on the 10th floor looking for the missing resident. Engine Co. 290 tried to fight their way into the hallway, but their fire hose was smaller than the regulation mandated hose for high-rise fires, and they couldn't get enough water from the 9th floor standpipe. Three firefighters from the 290th pushed through the flames anyway, sustaining severe burns, but by the time they reached the three members of Ladder Co. 170, it was too late (Flynn).
An investigation concluded that the sudden burst of flame on the 10th floor was caused by a pressure gradient in the hallway brought on by wind conditions near an open apartment window.
The conditions that led to the loss of life at Vandalia Avenue — sudden changes in hallway pressure due to unpredictable wind interactions with the building on the higher floors — were remarkably similar to the phenomena first investigated by Brooklyn Poly at 30 Church Street and in Cresci's wind tunnel experiments. This was likely a factor in the Fire Department's decision to work with Brooklyn Poly to investigate the circumstances of the fire.
However, based on the available archival material, Brooklyn Poly had not had a fire research center since CUES ceased operations. The timeline at this point is somewhat murky, but the basic sequence of events between the Vandalia Avenue Fire in 1998 and Brooklyn Poly's official involvement starting in the mid 2000s is reasonably clear, and hinges around one key moment: September 11, 2001.
Urban Security Initiative
As with all institutions in New York City, Brooklyn Poly felt the immediate impact of the attacks on September 11th. First and foremost, nine Brooklyn Poly alumni were killed in the attacks. Brooklyn Poly found itself in a quandary, having to make a decision about whether to continue with a desperately needed fundraiser planned for that November. But as Professor Richard Thorsen, in his memoir Remembering a Mistress, described, "Like so many others we resolved that the heinous terrorist attack on 9/11 would not deter us from moving forward with our mission..." (70).
Following 9/11, the broad issues of safety and security were suddenly brought to national attention, with one result being a shift in attitude towards the role that universities can and should play in safety and security research, with a corresponding shift in funding priorities. A 2011 article for Scientific American noted that "Scientists and science policy experts say the federal government's response to terrorist events in 2001 ... have had a profound effect on U.S. research in areas as diverse as forensics, biodefense, infectious diseases, public health, cyber security, geology and infrastructure, energy, and nuclear weapons" (Reich). For researchers investigating infrastructure security in the years following 9/11, the Federal Government's new focus on academic research in these areas opened up entirely new sources of funding for research programs and studies.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. In the world of academic research, funding is everything. Every experiment, study, survey, and investigation has to be paid for, and in the case of universities, that money often comes from government and non-profit grants.
For Brooklyn Poly, all of this meant that the research that had once been conducted on fire safety in New York City, particularly the research on how to make high-rise buildings resilient to wind driven fires, was now more relevant than ever.
In 2002, Brooklyn Poly established the Urban Security Initiative (USI) under Dr. George Bugliarello, who was then serving as the President Emeritus of the school. USI received its first round of funding in the form of a grant for $469,293 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Campbell). From its initiation, USI had a significant focus on fire safety. According to the Sloan Foundation's annual report, "The Center for Construction Management Technology [a Brooklyn Poly department whose work would be incorporated into USI research] is applying its three-dimensional modeling of buildings to the needs of the Fire Department to keep track of personnel and the spread of fire, to security issues associated with non structural elements ... and to the security of infrastructure networks..." (69).
Internal Brooklyn Poly documentation about the Sloan grant proved to be useful because these documents mention the earlier CUES studies conducted at 30 Church Street and Bushwick, but make no mention of any other fire safety research, which likely confirms that CUES either became defunct or no longer investigated fire safety in the 1980s (Bugliarello 2007).
USI's initial efforts in securing further grant money from the government had mixed results. An April 2003 application to the Chemical Biological Defense Initiatives Fund, as part of USI's early research into New York City's defense posture against anthrax attacks, was denied by the Department of Defense. Yet, just months later in July, successful lobbying of New York Senator Charles Schumer resulted in a $2 million DoD grant to research the use of sensor networks for similar chemical safety purposes in the City (Bugliarello).
2003 represented a turning point for USI, as this was the last year that Brooklyn Poly needed to petition members of Congress in order to access government funding through the DoD. The Department of Homeland Security, which was founded in 2002, was now operational and awarding grants to universities, opening up a new potential source of direct funding for USI.
Unfortunately, this is the point in the narrative where the exact timeline becomes unclear. Unlike with the Sloan Foundation documents, I was unable to find any direct sources for the DHS grant in the Poly Archives, such as grant applications or communications from the DHS. In fact, the grant is only mentioned in the archives in passing in some of the subsequent documents about funding for the Governors Island experiment.
It's also unclear how the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) became involved. They ultimately played a significant role in the experiment by conducting preliminary tests in Maryland and providing fire safety and engineering expertise to complement the research team provided by Brooklyn Poly.
This is an area where the pictures painted by the Poly Archives sources versus the available secondary sources are somewhat at odds. From my readings in the Poly Archives, it appeared that the Fire Department reached out to Brooklyn Poly for help with the experiment, and after formalizing that partnership agreement, the two groups jointly applied for the DHS grant. The NIST, meanwhile, is not mentioned in any of those documents. However, secondary reporting portray the partnership as having been primarily between the FDNY and NIST, with Brooklyn Poly barely mentioned, if at all, suggesting that Brooklyn Poly was simply acting in an advisory role to the Fire Department, since the FDNY does not have an in-house engineering research team.
In any case, by 2007, a three way partnership existed between Brooklyn Poly, the FDNY, and the NIST, with funding from the DHS, and the stage was set for Brooklyn Poly's first live burn test since the 1970s.