The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has released a new digital collection marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, highlighting how lessons from the World Trade Center tragedy shaped fire and life safety standards for high-rise buildings.
The collection, titled “NFPA and the World Trade Center: 25 Years Later”, brings together surveys, photographs, videos, presentations, reports, correspondence and other materials connected to the emergency response, evacuation research and building safety work that followed 9/11.
NFPA said the archive provides a broad overview of the events and their aftermath, with a focus on the safety systems that helped occupants escape and the vulnerabilities that were later addressed through research, investigations and changes to safety practice.
“When the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, occurred and an unthinkable set of circumstances played out, we witnessed in real time the impact of established fire and life safety systems and standards that enabled many people to escape to safety,” said Lorraine Carli, vice president of Outreach and Advocacy at NFPA. “At the same time, this horrific event exposed gaps and vulnerabilities that needed to be addressed.”
Much of the collection comes from materials created and compiled by Associationstaff members Robert Duval and Rita Fahy, who contributed to reports published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Duval, then an NFPA fire investigator and member of FEMA’s Building Performance Assessment Team, visited the World Trade Center recovery site in 2001 and contributed to FEMA’s building performance study and related reports. He currently serves as fire investigator and New England regional director at NFPA.
The archive also features examples of Fahy’s evacuation experience surveys following the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center evacuations. Her research focused on evacuation behavior, statistical modeling and firefighter safety, and helped inform changes to evacuation planning after the 1993 bombing.
“Rita Fahy’s research efforts captured unexpected findings from the 1993 bombing, including the fact that people behaved quite differently than previous research would have suggested. These survey results were instrumental in making changes to evacuations that likely saved many lives in 2001,” Carli said.
Some materials in the NFPA Research Library collection are publicly accessible, while most are available by research request. Items not publicly available can be requested through NFPA’s research request form. Additional 25th anniversary coverage is available in the Fall 2026 issue of NFPA Journal.
