12 years ago people in the North Tower were repeatedly told to stay at their desks and wait for rescue. Some people didn’t listen. They left the building and lived.
You don’t hear much discussion about how badly managed the disaster really was. The firemen and police could not communicate with each other. The sprinkler system failed. There was no plan in place to rescue people in the upper floors in case there was a large fire on any of the lower floors, let alone a plane crash. The firemen were sent into the building carrying 30 kilograms of equipment and asked to climb up to the 80th floor (or higher) by the stairs. This was courageous and selfless of them, but it was also an idiotic plan, given the gravity of the situation. They were heroes who probably died needlessly and in vain.
Did no one involved in building the World Trade Center ever sit down at a meeting and lead a discussion of what would happen if a massive fire broke out on one of the lower floors? How would people be rescued? I can only assume they believed that the fire suppression equipment would work flawlessly. Why was the World Trade Center exempted from some city fire regulations?
There was a door to the roof: it was locked by an electronic device and no one was able to open it. It probably would not have helped: the top of the tower is covered with guy wires and antennae making it impossible to land a helicopter.
An employee tried to put out some of the fires with an extinguisher: the extinguisher failed to operate.
Some people descended stairways only to find a dead-end and locked doors. In some cases, another stairway was clear and passable: they had no way of finding out, or in locating it. No one knows how many people died because they didn’t know where the exits were.
World Trade Center security staff repeatedly advised people to stay their desks. They even advised some people who had left the building to go back to their desks.
Were they not receiving instructions from anyone sane?
Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg initially refused to release more than 12,000 pages of “oral history” of the fire fighters activities on 9/11. The reason is obvious: the management of the disaster was a disaster. Radios failed, leadership was deficient, planning was inadequate, lives were wasted.
Watching the towers collapse, and people jumping from the 100th floor to their deaths, I often thought that if I ever ended up working in a tower like that I would buy myself a hang-glider and keep it near my desk.
It probably wouldn’t work. There may be reasons why– air currents, smoke, sealed windows– but, hell, most of the people who died in the upper floors obviously had no hope of any other escape. Whatever the odds of safely landing a hang-glider in an urban area, they would have been infinitely better the odds of surviving jumping off the building. They probably would also have been better than the odds of being rescued by a fireman climbing the stairs up 100 floors carrying 30-45 kilograms of firefighting equipment on his back.
Does that sound unbelievable? It does to me so I checked:
By then, the north tower firefighters had been on the move for more than an hour. Each carrying about 100 pounds of gear, only a few had climbed much higher than the 30th floor. Some recalled hearing radio messages from individual firefighters who had made it as far as the 40’s. NY Times
So why not have a parachute or glider or something of the sort available for every employee in the tower? Because it’s all mad and unthinkable, of course. Because it would seem preposterous.
But it would have been very cool, in the midst of that apocalyptic scene, to see someone jump from a broken window and hang-glide down, in slow, concentric loops, to the street.