I am trying to remember how long it was until the last living survivor was pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero.
Which leads to the slightly more horrifying form of the question: were the remains of any long-time survivors found? It seems likely that at least a few people survived in pockets of the underground levels and may have had food and water enough to survive for… days? weeks?
Was any such evidence of long-term survival found, and reported?
No one’s answering the OP though. Were there any dead bodies found where a medical examination indicated that they’d survived for some time in the rubble before dying of thirst, starvation, or suffocation? And if so, how long did they survive, if that was something that could’ve been determined?
But, I think when they started clearing the rubble, they didn’t think anyone would still be alive, so they just started cutting and pulling stuff apart. Any evidence of long term pocket survival ending after unendurable suffering from thirst and whatever other injuries the victim had, ending finally in long awaited unconsciousness and death, would have been likely lost.
ETA: I’m sure there weren’t any in the WTC, but I wonder about people being trapped for days in rubble, hoping to finally be rescued, but it has been so long that the rescuers think everyone is long dead, so they just start pulling apart the rubble, and THAT kills the victim. Surviving the earthquake or whatever, a week or more trapped, only to be ripped bodily apart by a backhoe. Shudder.
With 9-11, there was quite a lot of time between the planes hitting and the buildings falling down. Almost everyone below the impact areas had evacuated the area before the buildings collapsed. I think that the only ones left were law enforcement and fire/rescue.
If the building is not very tall, the debris doesn’t have far to fall. So it’s plausible that when it hits bottom it’ll do so “softly” enough to not be pulverized or to crush whatever random arrangements of lower wreckage may have made a pile containing a small empty space.
To be a survivor, you need to start out on a low floor so you don’t fall too far & be smashed when you hit bottom. AND then you need there to not be too much stuff falling above you from too great a height so that the falling stuff doesn’t smash whatever small lean-to of debris is on top of you. Finally, you need the whole collapse to be small enough that the air isn’t completely filled with powdered concrete for minutes; your lungs won’t work with too much dust stuck in them. Nor will an expedient like breathing through your shirt filter out that much dust.
Bottom line for 9/11: Given the total energy involved in that much building falling that far, it’s real unlikely any lean-to of debris withstood the rest of the collapse to leave a habitable space, much less that anybody happed to be in that habitable space, much less that they then survived breathing the dust-filled air for many minutes until the dust literally settled.
Yes, there were the two folks mentioned above. But two out of many thousand sounds like about the right odds. Those two are almost certainly not the tip of an iceberg of hundreds of other immediate survivors who then expired slowly over the next hours or days.
Longer-term survivors being trapped in building wreckage is something you see in frame house collapses, not in 100-story skyscraper collapses.
There was a survivor after 17 days (and two others found after 13 and 11 days) of the Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995. :eek: As it was only a five-story building, it seems consistent with LSLGuy’s post.
The construction of the WTC towers, IIRC, was a wide flat floor supported only on the perimeter and the central elevator column. When it started to go, it basically pancaked as the floor attachments broke off the columns because of being impacted by the weights above one after the other all the way down. There were not a lot of vertical concrete walls to create pockets, and the weight of 20 or 30 stories would pulverize those anyway.
There’s the account of one of the survivors originally in the express elevator, that they had to pry open the doors and use a window washer’s tool (?) to cut their way through the wall in front of them into the men’s room, then run down stairs and out. the central column was mostly walled in thicker gyproc (drywall) sheets for weight control. So again, not a lot of sheltering vertical concrete like a 5 or 8 storey building, not a lot of 2-foot-square columns to keep the floor above off you after the collapse.
As mentioned, the only known survivors were in the lower stairwells close to the ground.
Perhaps it’s not comforting or perhaps it is, but likely all the people above the impact died of the heat of the rising fire or smoke inhalation (or jumped) before the towers collapsed.
As for fires - the stuff was still smoking on the 28th when I saw it. IIRC - The search for the one bank’s gold held in a vault in the basement(?) found it but it had melted.
I worked on the recovery for several months (for a construction company). From the very beginning, one of the major challenges was balancing the knowledge that we needed heavy equipment to excavate and remove debris, but that there might be survivors who we would be crushing with that same equipement. We all remember the images of the valiant, but useless, “bucket brigades;” they figured prominently in discussions about the best course(s) of action. They were minimally damaging to the already unstable “pile,” but weren’t getting much done. In the meantime, if there were survivors, dehydration and traumatic injuries were putting them in increasing peril.