Forgive me if this has been beaten to death, but upon the almost-anniversary of 9-11, I find myself considering:
If you were on the floors above the point of impact and knew you had no escape, what would you do?
Feel free to point me to any such like-threads.
Die.
This. After jumping.
If I knew then what I know now, I’d start climbing and get as high in the building as I could, to maximize my chances that some of my remains might be found in the rubble, so as to provide some sort of closure.
Then I’d die.
Alternatively, I might also clear a long path to a window, break the window, then see how far I could get, and maybe see if I could land on the roof of a building across the street.
And then die, but at least people would be wondering “how the hell…”
I was just reading an article about one of the photos taken that day of the jumpers and an attempt to figure out the identity of one of them. The families reactions were quite interesting - some wanted to prove it was their loved one so they would have the closure of knowing they had a relatively quick death while others where absolutely opposed to the idea that their loved one gave up at any point.
Maybe climbing to the roof in the hopes that a helicopter evacuation would work and if that turned out to be a no go I would likely spend my last minutes curled up in a corner sobbing rather than choosing to end it all.
Yeah. I would get as far as “denial” in the grieving process. And then die.
I don’t think I’d stop trying to find a way to survive. I’m sure I would have died anyway, but I don’t think I would have stopped trying. Jumping and aiming at the softest spot might have seemed like an attractive option.
Assuming I had the mental capacity to understand the severity of my situation? Cry. Possibly try to call someone. I have no idea how fucked cellular telecommunications were but I would like to think that I’d spend my last minutes attempting to console my loved ones.
The OP missed the perfect opportunity to make a 1-choice poll.
I think this would be me, too. I’d try to come up with some plan for survival. It’s highly likely my plan (whatever it was) would have failed, but I would go down swinging.
Thinking about it in comfort and after the fact, I think I’d probably try to improvise a rope to try to climb past the damaged section (and take the stairs down from there). And I probably wouldn’t be finished with the rope before the collapse killed me.
I just came up with another question along the same lines. Imagine this happened in 2012. Do you think there would have been multiple Facebook postings saying, “Goodbye world.”?
Make like a kung-fu expert and ride out the flames. When the building collapses, I’ll skip and tip-toe from one falling rubble to the next all the way down.
Or, just climb up to the roof, crouch down, and jump in the air just before it hits ground zero, then walk out of the cloud of debris like nothing happened.
The reason people jumped is because burning to death is fucking horrible. Sitting on a window ledge with flames licking at your back and skin beginning to blister most of us would jump. Death is inevitable either way, but hitting the ground at 120 mph is a lot easier than slowly burning to death.
If you’re religious you might even consider some sort of miraculous divine intervention during your precipitous plunge.
The towers were considerably set back from the street, and there was nothing to land on but cement. I don’t believe you could get a wide enough trajectory to land on anything else. But I like the idea of climbing to the roof to be easily identified.
Write write write for as long as I could, and try to launch it so it might actually land without burning up. Future historians would thank me.
^
What’s there to write about?
We’d know, if someone wrote it!
Grab an umbrella and float to the ground like Mary Poppins.
Well, who you want to play you in the TV movie, for starters…