This from today’s issue of The Guardian in the UK:
'But what about those who jumped to their deaths? Was there nothing else they could have done? What about issuing those who live and work in skyscrapers with parachutes? Surprisingly, neither Foster nor Rogers, Baker nor Balmond find this suggestion absurd. Why not? We provide our city embankments with lifebelts. They have saved many lives. It’s a thought anyway. Can you think of anything better, short of not building high? But Balmond acknowledges it wouldn’t be so easy. ‘People could be thrown back against buildings and the logistics would be difficult,’ he says. ‘Just maybe, it could be worth a try.’
The four gentlemen mentioned are architects.
Is this idea feasible? If so, what scientific principles apply regarding the size of the parachute required and the distance above the ground from which a person could reasonably jump? Would weather conditions, particularly wind, be a factor in the equation? What other factors would have to be taken into consideration?
But imagine the sheer chaos of thousands of people bailing out of a building all at once. Without an orderly escape plan, a mass evacuation would never work, as folks on the 94th floor would slam into those on the 92nd, 89th, 74th, etc.
That said, had a few dozen people strapped on chutes and jumped, perhaps some might have lived. The fight to get to the windows, of course, would be fierce.
Well how many would have survived if everyone would have started to evacuate immediately after the crash? Rather than issuing parachutes to people they should be educated about how to exit rapidly and calmly. As people fail to do this I seriously doubt that parachutes will help at all.
It wouldn’t be very hard to divide workers in groups of 50 with one person in charge of their evacuation. This is probably used somewhere and most likely there is a regulation that orders something of this nature to be done.
Wasn’t the parachute originally designed (I think in Venice in the 1600s, but I’m not sure) as a way to escape burning buildings?
That said, tsunamisurfer is right. People would be crashing into each other. They’d also have to be trained to use them and have the courage to use them knowing that fatal collisions would occur. And handy is right. The windows don’t open.
First, some of the exit doors to the stairwells were jarred shut by the blast, meaning that people simply could not escape. Second, the WTC escape exits don’t allow for rapid evacuation–too small for such a huge building. From news reports I’ve read, WTC workers were lined up single file trying to get the hell out. At the same time, firefighters were trying to go UP. Evacuating takes a lot of time when you’re on the 90th floor and panic overruns the crowd.
Also this: your escape time from a building is limited by the slowest people in front of you.
Obviously, escape exits need to facilitate a much faster egress and the building security team who ordered people to return to their offices made a catastrophic mistake.
Most of the windows already busted from the impact, or the heat. Last night I was looking though a magazine and saw very disturbing pictures, ones I haven’t seen before. They actually showed people in the air as they were falling, and there was a close-up shot of about three people in each (broken) window trying to get away from the heat. The shot of the people standing in the windows was taken moments before the buildings collapsed. I was sorry I looked though the magazine, I felt so disturbed even more after seeing that.
Anyway, even if the windows weren’t broken, don’t you think people would have enough adrenilne to bust them?
I accept that many problems would need to be overcome with the parachute idea, but let us make a few assumptions:
A number of windows on each floor are capable of being opened. They are normally locked and keyholders are appointed.
The people who could use a parachute in these circumstances cannot make an exit by going down the stairs.
OK this is a difficult one but people are motivated in some way to make the leap in an orderly manner.
I make these comments in order to focus on the science of the matter. tsunamisurfer mentions that training would be required, but if the parachute could be small enough, yet remain effective, is the idea feasible, notwithstanding the probability of mid-air collisions.
Some chance with a parachute is surely better than no chance at all.
As I understand it, the stairwells in the WTC towers are located in the core area, in the center of the tower. Both planes damaged this upon impact, and the fires further engulfed this area, leading to the collapse. In these conditions, I don’t think any evacuation, no matter how calm, could have removed everyone. There weren’t enough evacuation routes.
To contribute to the answer of the OP, what you are proposing is equivalent to BASE jumping on a massive scale, by untrained personnel. BASE is an acronym for “Building, Antenna, Span (i.e., bridges), Earth(i.e., cliffs)” It is considered the most dangerous part of the sport of skydiving, and there have been quite a few deaths. Tall buildings, especially, drastically alter the wind patterns in their vicinity.
Maybe there are some BASE jumpers out there who can add their thoughts/experiences to this thread?
This has been a topic of discussion on the BASE board. Many agree that it might be worth while to peddle our services to buildings that are high enough where something like this would be an issue (> 300 ft). The idea is to use a standard BASE rig but with a round parachute instead of the squares we typically use (you cannot control rounds therefore have low probability of hitting the building).
For people who don’t know BASE is an ancronym for Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. One uses a BASE rig, usually single parachute, to jump these objects.
But you could reduce the untrained part by using rounds. Several of the dangers of not having any experience result from using squares as there is more for you to mess up. It is not part of skydiving. Not many skydivers BASE jump but all BASE jumpers have skydived.
Also… Buildings do have turbulence, which is more of a problem for square parachutes. In best case you only jump a building or cliff in 0 wind. If yo go any more than 3-5 mph you are taking a much greater chance of object strike or opening problems. I am almost sure with rounds turbulence would be less of a problem, but I myself don’t have any experience with them.
Another issue is canopy collisions (people running into one another after the parachute has deployed). If this happens with a square it can be potentially fatal for both. Under a round it isn’t as serious because you aren’t distorting the flight characteristics.
Other questions?
Um, with what genius? An office chair? Those windows are pretty damn thick and strong. They don’t break like John McClain kicking through movie glass.
This is really one of the more moronic ideas I have read. It is not practical for 10000 untrained office workers to skydive from a skyscraper. Think about footage you’ve seen of paratroopers landing on D-Day. Now imagine all those parachutes coming from a single building and landing in busy city streets with cars, lamp posts, buildings, unpredictable winds, and any number of other obstacles. Why not just inflate giant air bags all around the base of the building and have everyone jump?
Obviously everyone wouldn’t use the parachutes but likely even a few hundred would be worth while. All the obstacles may cause broken bones and maybe some more severe injuries, but would you rather impact the concrete at terminal velocity (assuming height greater than 1000 ft) or get burned alive?
200 ft is about as low as anyone likes to base jump over hard earth. There are multitudes of deployment methods. I will only do static lines from that height and I doubt people would like to stop and tie theirselves off to the object if it was onfire, so I’d say just have a freefall configuration and explain that 300 ft and higher is the only altitude it should be used.
in regard to:
I imagine it would be rather staged as most aren’t going to just bail out some will take their time. Also people have a tendency on their first base jumps to deploy the parachute immediately leaving the object. I think that would lower the likelihood of people hitting one another.
When I saw the footage of people falling, I could swear that one of them was in a classic free-fall skydiving pose. I remember thinking, “man, that guy had nerves of steel.” He either decided to go out on his terms, or he thought that he would be able to either steer himself away from people or even steer himself into something that he might have a remote chance of surviving when he hit.
Did anyone else see that?
Anyway, the parachute idea is silly. You’d have thousands of people hung up on the sides of the building and other buildings, many people wouldn’t jump in the first place, and there’s no way to get them out of the building and into the air. Those windows cannot be easily broken. I mean, I doubt if you could break one even if four men picked up a desk and heaved it into them. Glass breaking in a high-rise can kill people below, and there were thousands of windows in that building. They are designed to withstand 200 mph winds and the impacts of large birds being whipped around in storms. More importantly, they are designed to prevent suididal people from throwing a fire extinguisher through them and diving out.
That said, it might be worth considering other ways of fast egress from a high-rise, but don’t you think tower architects have spent a ton of effort on that idea? We just haven’t come up with anything reasonable.
There is an emergency egress system I saw for smaller buildings, which is basically a big cloth tube. You jump in the open end, and the friction of the cloth keeps you from falling very fast. But if you aren’t falling fast, and you’re going down 90 stories, it’s going to take a long time to get to the ground. So you can’t get very many people out that way, and I don’t know if we even have the materials that could withstand the tension of 1000 ft of people sliding down inside it.
Nostradamus suggested that certain windows on each floor would be rigged as escape routes, being able to open and perhaps having an extensible platform from which to jump.
Adding on that idea, these windows could be staggered in position from floor to floor, to offer some helpful distance from one jump platform and the next one below. This could reduce the danger of those from higher up jumping into 'chutes below.
All in all, it would take some computer modelling to show that this plan could help. It really could be worse than nothing, though I’m likely wrong on that.
