  The firewall transformation put forward by 't Hooft in recent years has made
ambitious claims of solving the firewall problem and the black hole information
paradox while maintaining unitary evolution. However, the theory has received
limited attention from the community, especially in regards to its foundations
in purely classical gravitational physics. This paper investigates the
underlying assumptions of 't Hooft's firewall transformation before
quantization. We find that the limiting procedure used by 't Hooft in order to
obtain an identification of the quantum operators for ingoing and outgoing
particles near a black hole is not consistent. We propose a correction, which
involves a more relaxed approximation regime. In the new approximation regime,
we find a new classical analog for the firewall transformation for spherical
shells, which allows evolving the spherical shells' dynamics past their point
of collision. In the classical theory, no firewall is removed, as both ingoing
and outgoing matter is present on every spacelike hypersurface, and it does not
appear that any firewalls will be removed after a canonical quantization.
