Can anyone tell me what is going on in the heads of people who choose to jump from upper stories when trapped in high rise fires? It is a curious phenomenon and I do not understand if the choice is a conscious decision or a primal reaction. Especially curious to me is why, when this phenomenon occurs do people seem to do it in groups, or waves? The examples i am thinking of is the one case with the young girls in 1911, I believe and the WTC. Does anyone know any other major cases?
I remember reading somewhere that there is process in the brain by which it randomly decides impossible decisions, e.g. ‘Should I run down the stairs, which are on fire, or should I jump out of the window?’ Your brain simply makes the decision, and then sticks to it, even if the stairs collapse before you head for them. I suppose this is some kind of survival instinct, to make you decide which is better than burning to death in the room.
Are you serious about the decision being random? So if you were to choose to run down the burning stairs, and they collapsed you would still try to go down the stairs?
That is weird…any sources on that?
no, sorry, I can’t remember where it was. The reasoning was that either decision would appear equally dangerous, and as a survival instinct you would simply decide on one route as doing something is better than nothing, and continue with the one you decided on because otherwise you would keep on going back and forth between the two. Its a little like psyching yourself up to do it.
Sorry I’m not explaining it very well!
I’ve never been in a fire, but I know that being burned hurts. The fires in the towers were quite hot and very painful. I imagine that what was going on in their heads was that they must get away from the pain. They must have realized that they would not survive the fall, but at least they were away from the pain.
IANAP (P=Psychotherapist) but everyone else in my family is… at any rate, the horrific circumstances those poor people were trapped in strike me as a specific instance of the “would you rather have a quick death than a slow death” dilemma that I’m sure we’ve all considered at some point in our lives. Given a choice between enduring intense heat while suffocating in a smoky hell or plummeting 70+ stories to my doom, I may very well have jumped myself. As for the groups/waves thing, I suppose the thought process behind that would be “if I’m going to die, at least I won’t die alone, and there’s a comfort in that.”
I remember reading somewhere, although I don’t remember where, that it happens when the person accepts that they are going to die. Then they have a choice, burnt to a crisp or at least leaving somehting for the family to bury. Hell, at leats leaving the family somethign that can be identified as you.
Grim I know, but it is a grim situation.
So, I cannot find any information on this phenomenon on the web. Is there a name for this psychological condition? Something I can search the web for?
Yes, I believe that it’s called “Yerfuct Syndrome”. 
much like the Shitouttaluck Disorder.:rolleyes:
In the book " The perfect storm" Sebastion Junger talks about the reflex that causes people to take in the last breath (of water) when thay are drowning.
The explanation is that the brain figures "i’m drowning. Somethings’ gotta change or I’m gonna die! " the most natural instinct is to breath. The brain can keep us from acting on that impulse but figures what the hell…
My friend Wes stole my copy of the book so I can’t look up the cite, maybe one of you can.
BTW only 90% of people actually do this , he says, so the method of checking the lungs for water in an attempt to uncover foul play is a bit skewed.
My thought was that with the fire raging, staying is certain death. Jumping offers a miniscule chance of survival–plus you get to experience free fall.
If I were caught in the upper floors of the WTC, I would have jumped too.
Those fires were fueled by jet fuel burning at a few thousand degrees and capable of melting the superstructure of the towers. Feeling the sensation of being cooked alive while inhaling poisonous fumes and smoke would have likely made me choose to go out the window.
I am amazed that people are confused about why someone would jump.
PLEASE read this:
If your are one of the confused, please erase the picture you have of a man facing a window 70 stories up and a fire behind him. It’s not that clear cut…not like a dilemma, or a riddle.
Imagine being squeezed next to the window hoping for your dear life as temps in the inescapable room climb so high that your skin starts to bubble, you start to be cooked alive…your lungs are on fire…to you, they are on fire, and you are beign roasted alive with NO WHERE to go…except the window…and throw in some of the most dreadful screams one can imagine in the background.
You can’t stand, sit or kneel, the floor is the oven pan…your lungs are going to burst…you are blistering, or know it’s coming any second…
There is no choice…you jump. For some who delayed jumping, they waited too long to get that last moments peace. They were cooked, or their lungs gave way…their last moments were the screams in the background.
Any fire is brutal…even if you aren’t on fire or next to the fire…the superheated noxious air and the temps from the burning fuel create a horror that one would choose to escape anyway possible.
Take away that simple scenario you have etched in your brain of a person facing a jump while looking at fire…it just isn’t that simple.
Think of the absolute horror of being cooked alive, inside and out without any options but jumping. You need not be directly in flames to be engulfed in unimaginable horror.
I think Philster has described it well; it’s not a conscious decision. It’s an automatic reaction, the body recoiling from tremendous pain.
There’s a passage in the book “The Shining” where the main character, Jack, is stung by a wasp from a nest he uncovers when he’s fixing the roof on the hotel. He thinks to himself that it was a good thing he found the nest in the fall, when the wasps are cold and drowsy, because if a workman had found them in summer he’d be stung dozens of times… and would probably just run right off the roof trying to get away. Imagine that happened to you; you’re working on a roof and suddenly fifty wasps are stinging you all over your body, incredible agony, like hot pokers being stuck into you from every direction. You’re going to run like a crazy bastard. And you probably would not have falling off the roof high on your list of concerns.
That’s what it was like in the WTC. There’s no “decision” to be made. Maybe in some cases some people decided it was a better route, but I imagine that for the most part, victims like in the WTC or the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster weren’t thinking about anything when they jumped, beyond a primordial, instinctive “ESCAPE” motivation.
“Dangling from the Golden Gate Bridge and Other Narrow Escapes” by John Anthony Adams, Library of Congress catalog card number 88-91962.
An amazing collection of stories of survival from almost certain death, falls without parachutes, riding a huge air bubble up from a sunken submarine, earthquakes, fires, tornados…
“I thought a great deal about my mother and I was the apple of her eye…She was the only person I thought about as I came down, and I thought about very little else.”
Results published in 1892 by a University professor after 25 years and hundreds of interviews with fall survivors: “No grief was felt nor was there paralyzing fright…There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundredfold velocity or intensity…No confusion entered at all…Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact, and the impact was, at the most, heard but never painfully felt.”
“After the horror and scorching heat of the fire, he relished the cool gentle breeze that blew past him…he felt calm and unafraid. He attributed this to the enormous sense of relief that he felt after escaping the fire. He much preferred to die by falling…his feelings of deliverance overshadowed any feelings about the new form of death he faced.”
At least insofar as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is concerned, I think the girls may have considered that their odds were not quite as dire. That is, maybe a 75-90% chance they would be killed by the fall, vs. 100% chance for the WTC victims. The TSF fire victims were mostly stuck on the 9th floor of a 10-story bldg. Some jumped into fire dept. safety nets (which broke when several jumped simultaneously). But, even though a 100-foot drop is not in your favor, it’s not TOTALLY unsurvivable. They had a slim chance. When I was in college, a drunken fool toppled out of a window on the 7th floor of an apt. bldg., and lived. That same year, someone else fell from a second-story balcony onto their head and died.
You can’t predict with certainty how things’ll turn out.
On a (more or less) related note… similar thoughts were in the minds of flyers during World War I. Most pilots started carrying sidearms just in case the plane caught fire. Many decided that a bullet through head was better than burning alive (a not-uncommon way to die in a fabric covered, wood framed “kite” filled with a thin gas tank next to the pilot). Although it appears uncommon for the gun to have been used they still had to try to weigh some rather heavy choices and most decided in advance that ANY option was better than buring alive.
Let’s clear up one thing. Many did not jump. They were pulled out of the windows. Change in airpressure broke windows out and bodies went with them, in many cases.
I always assumed it was in case they had to land in hostile territory (and defend themselves).