Consultant Helps Highrises Prepare for the Big One
Building plans could save lives after a quake
Curtis Massey hails all the way from Virginia, but he figures that San Francisco needs the services of his safety-consulting firm as much as any city.
His Massey Enterprises, based in Norfolk, designs detailed, color-coded guides to help firefighters and other emergency workers quickly grasp the layout and mechanical operations of highrise office buildings. A building’s guide is kept in a fireproof safe box in the building’s main control room, and the building manager and engineer also get copies.
A San Francisco ordinance requires highrise managers to keep emergency plans on file, but many of the plans are sketchy at best. In a 1906-size earthquake and fire, fully detailed guides could help the San Francisco Fire Department save lives and millions of dollars worth of property.
Of course, a disaster of that magnitude would be more than the department alone could handle. “Most people realize that if the Big Quake hits San Francisco, the Fire Department won’t be able to reach many buildings,” said Massey, himself an ex-firefighter, during a sales trip to San Francisco. “They’ll be overwhelmed with emergencies and that means building owners and managers will be on their own to handle a fire and other emergencies.” Massey said his guides could make a big difference.
His company — which has 55 employees, including 27 active firefighters — prepares thick loose-leaf notebooks filled with diagrams. They contain detailed floor plans of a building, and show the locations of water valves, ventilation shafts, elevator banks, stairwells, air ducts and electrical and alarm systems.
They also provide inventories and locations of materials and equipment, computer systems, important business records and works of art, and list all the tenants on each floor of the building. Massey Enterprises prepares the plans at a price of 2¢ per square foot to 4¢ per square foot [Note:\ figures have changed – Ed.]. That would mean a minimum of $10,000 for a building the size of the Transamerica Pyramid.
The 6 year-old company had revenues of $700,000 last year, and expects to bring in $2 million this year. Many of Massey’s plans have been sold in Chicago, and one of those was used to determine a safe evacuation route for tenants of a building in the Loop during April’s big flood.
Massey recently delivered his first plan for a San Francisco building — to the managers of One Bush Street, the headquarters of the Hambrecht & Quist investment-banking firm.
Laurence Hjulberg, director of operations for Compass Management Leasing, which manages One Bush, said that he will buy plans from Massey for other Compass clients as well, including the owners of 120 Montgomery Street and 201 Spear Street in San Francisco and more than 100 other buildings that Compass manages nationwide for Equitable Real Estate.
“I understand that when the Big One hits, the windows of these high-rises may pop out and leave three feet of glass in the streets,” Hjulberg said. “That means fire trucks won’t be able to get through. If that happens, this could help us.”
Bill Shaughnessy, an assistant-fire chief based in downtown San Francisco, said that he has “never seen anything as extensive or as geared to firefighters as Massey’s plan. It could give us a key piece of information that would help solve a problem sooner than we might otherwise.”
Massey, who served as a lieutenant with the fire department in Chesapeake, Va., came up with the idea for Massey Enterprises in 1986. He needed a new sideline because he wasn’t fit enough to return to a part-time job as a construction worker after recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle accident. (He went over a 150-foot cliff and broke his back, neck and several ribs.)
Massey knew from experience that firefighters often have to make life-or-death decisions with inadequate information. “We lost precious time figuring out where elevators lead or what air ducts to close to prevent smoke from spreading throughout a building.”
By last August, Massey Enterprises was doing so well that Massey was able to quit the fire department and give the business his full attention.