Blasts, terrorism spawn industry for ex-firefighter
by Dale Anne Freed
Published in The Toronto Star, 1998
Curtis Massey is an optimist who plans for the worst.
The retired Virginia Beach fire lieutenant has made a business of developing disaster plans for North American highrises.
And now he hopes to add Toronto skyscrapers to his list of super-safe buildings.
Massey, 40, travels North America like a highrise safety evangelist, clutching his “building Bible,” a loose-leaf binder containing detailed floor plans for some of the best known addresses in 65 U.S. and three Canadian cities.
“We go in and pre-plan the buildings for the fire department so when they go in everything they want to know about the building and its systems is at their fingertips,” Massey said.
Last month, Toronto’s Sun Life Centre joined Massey’s client list, which includes New York’s Empire State Building and Atlanta’s Coca-Cola Complex.
“I don’t believe any buildings in Toronto have ever had such plans until now,” said Gary Hughes, manager of the Sun Life Centre at King St. and University Ave. “It serves a double feature — fire security and life safety.”
“You prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” explained Massey.
And events such as the World Trade Centre bombing in New York and the Oklahoma City explosion have shown how deadly the worst can be.
“We’ve clearly entered an era of terrorism,” Massey said.
“It’s not just expected bombings of highrises, but also the release of toxic agents within the ventilation systems of these buildings.”
Toronto is not immune from such worries, emergency planners say.
“Disaster planning is a huge concern in Toronto,” said Dave Johnston, a disaster planner with the Hamilton-based, not-for-profit Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness.
“There are increasing risks of individuals or radical groups doing damage to make a point,” Johnston said. “In big cities there is such a huge concentration of people and businesses all dependent upon a critical infrastructure.”
For two days last September, for than 500 staff at CIBC’s VISA customer support centre in downtown Toronto had to be evacuated “due to an unexplained noxious gas,” in the air vents, Johnston said.
That incident will be one of the topics discussed at the eighth annual world conference on disaster planning that runs from today until Wednesday at the Hamilton Convention Centre.
Massey’s colour-coded floor plans, each of which take six to eight months to complete and cost anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, pinpoint ventilation shafts, elevators, stairwells, water valves, electrical and alarm systems, inventories and hazardous materials.
“It’s a unique plan … the only pre-fire disaster plan I’ve seen in this kind of detail,” says Peter Sells, chief training officer at the Toronto Fire Academy.
Although such a plan might “seem obvious … it takes resources, time and money … we don’t have anywhere near the resources to produce something like this in that detail,” Sells said.
“It will be of tremendous use to an incident commander.”