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Awarded Contracts for External Experts to Support the 

NIST World Trade Center (WTC) Disaster Investigation

Contract No. Awarded to Date Awarded

SB1341-04-W-0093 Hughes Associates, Inc. (HAI) 10/30/2003

ANALYSIS OF SMOKE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN WTC BUILDINGS

Under solicitation number SB1341-03-Q-0835, a firm fixed price purchase order has been awarded to 

Hughes Associates, Inc. (HAI). 

Established in 1980, HAI is a fire protection engineering, research, and consulting firm whose experience 

includes fire hazard and risk analysis, fire modeling, fire protection design, code consulting, product 

development, and litigation support. HAI’s staff has earned an international reputation in the application of 

advanced technologies to solve both standard and unique fire protection problems. 

Specific tasks related to WTC Buildings 1, 2, and 7 that the Hughes team will perform include:

1) Document the design and installation of the smoke management systems and compare designs to 

applicable code and standards requirements.

2) Document the normal operation of the fully functional smoke management systems and its potential 

effect on smoke conditions in WTC Buildings 1 & 2 on September 11, 2001. 

HAI’s project team includes senior level engineers and staff engineers with extensive experience in the 

design, specification, installation, testing, and performance assessment of smoke management systems, 

including new and existing systems. Experience in performance assessment includes (1) quantitative 

evaluations of system performance using fire models and building airflow models, (2) conceptual design 

of new or existing smoke management systems (both as the design engineer and as third party peer 

reviewer), (3) commissioning testing to evaluate the performance of installed smoke control systems and 

(4) code and standards compliance evaluation of existing systems.

Selected experience of the key personnel assigned to this effort is summarized below: 

Michael J. Ferreira, P.E., Principal Investigator – Mr. Ferreira has over 10 years experience 

including fire protection engineering R&D, quantitative fire hazards analysis, design and 

evaluation of smoke management systems and code and standards activities associated with 

smoke management systems. He is a member of NFPA Technical Committee on Smoke 

Management Systems and has published numerous technical papers on smoke control system 

design including the implementation of unique approaches in the application of building airflow 

and contaminant transport analysis software to evaluate smoke movement and smoke 

management systems in large complex structures including WTC 1 and 2. 

Mark T. Wright, P.E., Staff Engineer – Mr. Wright has over 5 years experience in the modeling of 

smoke management systems in large complex structures including high-rise buildings. Other 

experience includes egress evaluations from large complex structures, code consulting, smoke 
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control design. He is a member of NFPA, SFPE and is a two-time recipient of the SFPE 

Scholarship. 

Steve M. Strege, Staff Engineer – Mr. Strege’s experience includes fire/smoke, building airflow 

and contaminant transport modeling for several large complex structures. Other experience 

includes egress evaluations from large complex structures, code consulting, on-site fire 

investigations and the modeling and study of smoke plume behavior under various fire scenarios. 

He is a member of SFPE, NFPA, University of Maryland College Park Scholars and the recipient 

of several academic engineering scholarships. 

John A. Lee, P.E., Senior Fire Protection Engineer – Mr. Lee has almost 30 years of experience 

as a fire protection engineer. His experience includes design and testing installed smoke control 

systems for conformance to design and building codes. He also acted as a special inspector on 

several high-rise buildings including smoke management systems. 

Joseph L. Scheffey, P.E., Project QA/QC – Mr. Scheffey has over 20 years of experience in fire 

hazard analysis, fire/smoke modeling and smoke control system evaluation and is the author of 

over 100 technical publications.