Apartment City

Kansas City firefighters now take two simple safety steps that might have saved the lives of two colleagues in a 2015 building collapse . The steps were among the recommendations in a federal report released Thursday . Emergency tones are sounded, as they were two years ago, when firefighters are ordered out of a collapse zone. But now heads are counted to make sure everyone got the message — which was not done before. Fire Chief Paul Berardi acknowledged those steps might have saved the lives of John Mesh and Larry Leggio, who perished at a fire scene on Independence Boulevard. The federal report cites a series of operational failures that contributed to the firefighters’ deaths. The report said the two men should not have been in an alley next to the three-story building after all personnel were directed to pull back because of fears the walls would collapse. Six minutes after that order was given, they died in an avalanche of bricks. Poor communication and the failure to establi...

Amazon’s extraordinary growth has turned Seattle into the biggest company town in America. Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city, the most for any employer in a major U.S. city, according to a new analysis conducted for The Seattle Times. Amazon’s footprint in Seattle is more than twice as large as any other company in any other big U.S. city, and the e-commerce giant’s expansion here is just getting started. The swarms of 20-somethings crowding into South Lake Union every morning represent an urban campus that is unparalleled in the United States — and they have helped transform Seattle , for better or worse. Amazon’s rapid rise has fueled an economy that has driven up wages and lowered unemployment, but also produced gridlock on the roads and sky- high housing prices . And while Seattle’s booming economy is often attributed to a wide variety of factors, increasingly, it’s all about one company. Amazon now occupies more office space t...