Disaster planning expert warns of another attack

Nov 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Matt Valley

Grim. There's no other way to describe the words voiced by Curtis Massey, president and CEO of Massey Enterprises Inc., whose expertise is helping commercial real estate owners nationwide develop disaster plans for their buildings. “These [terrorists] are very methodical. The contact I have within the FBI Urban Terrorism Task Force believes that the next attack is going to be even bigger than the World Trade Center attack, which is mind-boggling.”

Given his experience and what he's witnessed firsthand, Massey is hardly an alarmist. A former firefighter who launched his Virginia Beach, Va.-based company in 1986, Massey was stationed at the Ground Zero command post four hours after the towers were destroyed on Sept. 11 and remained there for the next 10 days.

Massey cites Brookfield Properties' buildings in Lower Manhattan as the model for disaster preparedness on Sept. 11. Detailed diagrams of building layouts from the Massey disaster plans were used extensively by local and federal rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during search operations. “[Brookfield] evacuated their buildings in record time. Their buildings performed by leaps and bounds better than any others in Lower Manhattan because they were prepared and trained,” Massey says.

Despite threats of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Massey says too many owners of high-profile properties have lapsed into complacency on the disaster-planning front.

“Pre-planning the building for the fire department's operations is the most important element of a building's disaster-preparedness program, not concrete barriers, security guards or turnstiles,” Massey says. “The more information you provide emergency responders, the more apt they are to make sensible decisions to bring the situation under control.”

Contributed by Matt Valley, editor of AC&SS sister publication National Real Estate Investor (www.nreionline.com).

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