For Immediate Release
COULD THE TWIN TOWERS HAVE
BEEN SAVED?
Maryland Engineer Awarded
Patent for Innovative Invention
July
2006
The United States has issued
a patent for an advanced fire
extinguishing system that, if installed in the World Trade Center, may have
controlled the fires, saving thousands of lives as well as the towers
themselves.
Inventor Michael Paulkovich
of Severna Park was frustrated after September 11th 2001, when analysts
explained that the reason the Twin Towers fell was simply because of intense,
uncontrollable fires. "Think of
it," he ponders, "every floor has
sprinklers -- thousands per floor,
and each tower had hundreds of thousands of sprinklers, and pipes
full of water. Yet, only the sprinklers on the affected floors would
have activated… which were damaged and useless anyway," he says. "Nobody was addressing that; they
accepted as fact that the towers had
to fall, because the fires were beyond control. To me, this was a system in need of
improvement."
Determined to solve the
problem, he invented a fire extinguishing system where sprinkler pipes on every
floor are interconnected and share water to all other floors. More importantly, his system is tolerant
of major damage, reacting automatically to broken pipes by sealing off damaged
sections and re-routing through any piping paths that remain intact. The invention may be used with other
fire-suppressing chemicals instead of water, such as foams or dry chemicals, to
extinguish liquid fuel fires.
The Patent Office expedited
his invention because of its anti-terrorism applications, and granted
U.S. patent number 7,048,068,
describing a network of pipes, valves and sensors to share water
and automatically react to damage.
Other design features include spatial separations and redundant flow
paths.
His improved fire-fighting
system addresses the security needs of the Freedom Tower (which will replace the
Twin Towers in NYC), and could be a safety enhancement to other potential
terrorist targets, such as the Sears Tower, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia,
Taipei 101 in Taiwan, and others.
The invention can be used on other structures, such as cruise ships and
aircraft carriers, and existing extinguishing systems can be retro-fitted with
its essential features.
END
More:
Entire Patent
Document (Adobe/PDF)
Newspaper Article, Severna
Park Voice (Sep 7 2006)
Magazine
Article, What's Up Annapolis (Jan 2007)
Trade Journal Article, Journal
Of Applied Fire Science (2006)
