9/11 World Trade Center Attacks: Lessons in Fire Safety Engineering After the Collapse of the Towers

摘要

Every engineering discipline has been shaken by tragic events at some point. Ralph W. Emerson (1803-1882) wrote that "We learn geology the morning after the earthquake". Humans tend to identify gaps of knowledge after a catastrophe. Over time, progress and modern societies have established the means to set up major independent investigations after a technological disaster strikes. Their objective is to unearth the causes and learn lessons from the event so that similar catastrophes are avoided in future. In order for this to happen, it is essential that the results of the investigations are widely disseminated and that the scientific community carefully analyses them, critically assesses them and further improves the conclusions and lessons. This special issue invites the fire safety engineering community to just do that with respect to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York (Figure 1).