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Five years ago this week, people who lived in the nation's tallest buildings were reassessing whether they wanted to live up in the sky. Maybe they would be targets of terrorism -- and maybe the insurance for living in skyscrapers would make it too expensive a venture.

Not only has skyscraper construction not slowed down -- it has surged nationwide. Later this month, the International Code Council will hold a hearing about the ways in which tall buildings can be made more terrorist-resistant.

The Associated Press reports:

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001, pundits declared that the landscape of American cities would be altered by the fear of terrorism. They were half right.

The changes don't involve reducing the height of new towers, as one might expect, but what happens at the bottom of existing ones -- where truck-proof barriers have sprouted like defensive ankle bracelets at the base of any building that might be a target.

Meanwhile, there's a high-rise boom in cities across the nation, including San Francisco, where planners want to allow new towers that would climb beyond the Transamerica Pyramid, now the city's tallest building.

The spate of attention-getting towers is not some sort of patriotic defiance of terrorism. Decision-makers say the horror of a single event doesn't erase the logic of clustering tall buildings in big cities -- especially as more people seek to live and work in places where they don't need an automobile.

"You can't discard an entire type of building because of the threat of terrorism," said Dean Macris, San Francisco's planning director. "Skyscrapers are too important a building block for cities in terms of transportation and convenience."

No new tower can erase what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists flew two jets into the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center, causing both to collapse and killing 2,802 people. That searing carnage -- captured on live television -- remains as vivid as ever in the minds of many people.

Within hours of the assault, concrete barriers were lugged into place along the sidewalks and plazas outside numerous towers worldwide. In the next week came talk that urban society's long infatuation with skyscrapers might end: New ones wouldn't be built because they would be seen as targets, not triumphs.

"Like some modern-day dinosaur, overnight the skyscraper finds itself at odds with the abrupt new realities of its environment," wrote architecture critic Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star. "Height, the very quality that once made it so successful, may now be its greatest weakness."

Nearly five years later, the dinosaur shows no signs of extinction. In Chicago, for instance, a 2,000-foot tower was recently approved. Even in Boston, a traditionally height-wary city, developers are competing for the right to build a 1,000-foot tower in the historic financial district.

In San Francisco, five towers that will exceed 30 stories now are under construction, more than at any time since the early 1980s. Most will pop high above their neighbors on low-lying blocks south of Market Street; one is a hotel, and three are residential, including the 55-story One Rincon Hill rising alongside the Bay Bridge with the marketing slogan "Your life. Above all."

There's plenty of interest in new high-rise units; the developers of One Rincon said 90 percent of their 360 units are spoken for, and the project's 45-story second phase could start construction next year.

Even taller buildings for San Francisco might be on the way. To help finance a new Transbay Terminal at First and Mission streets, city planners want to relax zoning codes to allow three towers that would be at least the height of the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid. For added drama, one would rise an additional 150 feet to become what could be the nation's tallest building west of Chicago.

That is certainly not what pundits predicted a few years ago. Look at this Christian Science Monitor story from March 12, 2002:

"It's pretty clear that in America especially, plans to build super-tall buildings -- iconic buildings -- will be on hold for a long time," says Jeffrey Heller, an architect at Heller Manus in San Francisco.

There are early suggestions of a shift in attitudes. In Chicago, plans for the new Trump Tower have been nearly halved since Sept. 11. What was tentatively planned to be, at 120 stories, the world's tallest building, is now set to go forward at 78 stories, making it the fourth-tallest building in the city.

The story added:

The concerns are not all about fear. Two officials investigating the World Trade Center disaster last week implored Congress to set new standards for construction of federal buildings -- a proposal that could reverberate into private businesses, making it more costly to build taller.

Moreover, insurance for tall buildings is soaring. Metal detectors and bag searches are now de rigeur in the foyers of many of America's tallest buildings, and strictly kept guest lists determine who can and can't come in. It's far from an ideal business environment, some say.

"Who needs it?" says Martin Wolf, an architect in Chicago. "There are only so many fire drills that a company wants to go through."

Yet, in many ways, Sept. 11 was just the last blow for an icon already in decline. Since the days of the Great Gatsby and swing dancing, each economic boom has led to a new spate of mega-skyscraper construction.

What is being planned for your town or state? What happened to those predictions that insurance would cost so much nobody could afford to build high-rises?

What steps have builders taken to make high-rises more terror-resistant?

Here are some more resources for you as you pursue this story:

• The Christian Science Monitor: June 2005 -- "Terror-Proofing U.S. Skyscrapers"

• The Skyscraper Safety Campaign [PDF] started after the September 2001 attacks. Here is the group's Web site.

• Remember when there were people marketing executive high-rise emergency parachutes? Did anybody ever buy those things? I thought these were kind of cool. 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sounds the alarm over a too-common practice of performing angioplasty when there is no heart surgeon at a hospital.

The paper says that some doctors are concerned about the growing number of angioplasties being done at hospitals that might not have a heart surgeon and support staff to perform emergency surgery to save a patient, should anything go wrong.

The story adds:

National medical practice guidelines say that elective angioplasty -- done when the patient is not having a heart attack -- should not be performed at hospitals that do not have on-site heart surgery backup.

Here is some advice for patients:

Doctors say patients should ask this question about where they have an elective angioplasty: Would they rather a have heart surgeon on duty in case of a problem, or is it acceptable if they are urgently transferred out by ambulance or helicopter or that a surgical team has to be called in from another city? [...]

Most patients sail through the procedure, which is lucrative for the hospitals. In 2003, 664,000 angioplasties were performed in the United States at average cost of $38,000 each, according to the American Heart Association. From 1987 to 2003, the number of angioplasties increased 326 percent.

Nationally, the in-hospital death rate for all angioplasties was 0.8 percent. That includes deaths that occur after emergency, or so-called primary, angioplasty, which is performed when the patient is suffering an actual heart attack. The vast majority of angioplasties are elective.

Although angioplasty has become safer since the 1980s, research suggests, emergency heart surgery still is needed in 0.4 percent to 2 percent of cases.

In the largest study of the issue, researchers found a 38 percent higher mortality rate in elective angioplasties performed at hospitals that don't perform heart surgery. The 2004 study analyzed 625,854 Medicare-paid angioplasties at 1,121 hospitals.

Killer Carp

We have talked a good bit over the years on Al's Morning Meeting about the growing problem of invasive species. The Detroit Free Press ran a piece recently about those giant carp that just keep spreading through waterways and now are less than 50 miles from Lake Michigan. If they make it into the Great Lakes, there might be no stopping them.

The story explains:

Two species of Asian carp -- silver carp that leap like kangaroos, and bigheads, which don't jump -- have been spotted in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal below Lake Michigan. In their native Southeast Asia, the bigheads can reach 4 feet and 100 pounds, the silvers 4 feet and 60 pounds.

To stop the carp's advance, fishing interests want Congress to quickly fund the permanent barrier in the canal near Chicago and renovate the temporary barrier as a backup.

The House and Senate have passed separate bills to fund the barriers but must reach a compromise in a conference committee. Even then, some people fear that the carp already have reached the Great Lakes and that the barriers will prove ineffective because fish can be shoved across by the wakes of barges.

Michigan's senior senator, Carl Levin, and other members of the Michigan congressional delegation have pushed for the funding, and Levin said Friday that they'll continue that fight.

"There are very serious concerns that these exotic species would devastate native fisheries in the Lakes and undo years of restoration efforts," Levin, a Democrat, said in a statement.

"I have worked with my colleagues for several years to ensure funding for the temporary electric dispersal barrier, and I will continue working to authorize funding in the Water Resources Development Act for the construction of a permanent barrier and the operation of both barriers by the Army Corps of Engineers."

If the carp do reach the Great Lakes, most experts warn that the lakes will become giant carp ponds where other species, such as salmon, lake trout and walleyes, are starved out of existence. After colonizing the lakes, experts say, the carp would assault rivers and their tributaries. Sport and commercial fisheries are a $5-billion-a-year business on the Great Lakes.

"These things are so scary because of the way they can take over the habitat and become dominant so quickly," said Gary Towns, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources fisheries resources manager in Southfield.

In 1990, for instance, biologists netted no Asian carp when they sampled the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Ten years later, Asian carp made up 97 percent of a massive fish kill in a Mississippi slough south of St. Louis. Asian carp were first seen in the Bath area about five years ago, but now represent 90 percent of the fish.

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