Thousands of untrained people manage to parasail every year. I’m sure there would be a way to make it simple as stepping off a platform. The parasail would carry you away from the building, and then you’d be out of danger from debris and other jumpers. A couple of thousand feet of good nylon twine might have saved a few lives. External fire escapes would probably not have saved these people, but would have in other building fires.
Lower buildings would certainly save some lives. What is the real benefit, beyond prestige, of building a tower 110 stories high? When I toured the tower, it seemed to me a celebration of greed and vanity. I stood by the window at Windows on the World watching the helicopters and rain clouds far below, the doll house cathedral no larger than my thumbnail. A single word summed it up for me: “Mammon.” And suddenly I felt the urge to run as fast as I could to get out of there before God struck it down, and that I did. I don’t have any fear of heights, but there was something about the towers that spooked me. I never went back.
Issuing parachutes to people working in high rises sounds a bit far-fetched… like something my ex-husband would do - trying to plan for every possible contingency. I mean, most people won’t even protect themselves from the sun, and most people are a hell of a lot more likely to die from skin cancer than having to jump from their office window.
There are lots of reason to build tall skyscrapers.
[ul]
[li]Real estate in Manhattan is horribly expensive. If you need a lot of space, sometimes the only option is to go straight up.[/li][li]Companies often need lots of contiguous floor space, and can’t easily spread their operations over multiple buildings. So they build tall ones.[/li][li]They make a good place to put communication antennas[/li][li]Prestige.[/li][li]Profit. At least until last Tuesday, floors on the top of tall buildings commanded very high rents. The view is spectacular, the association with other high-powered outfits is valuable, the address is impressive, etc. That means landlords always have an incentive to go higher.[/li][li]Because we can. The world would be a boring place if we didn’t push our limits, and that includes the limits of commercial building architecture.[/li][li]Tuesday notwithstanding, these buildings have proven to be very, very safe. When’s the last time you can remember anyone dying in a skyscraper due to a building problem? Hell, there were only 14 deaths when a B-25 hit the Empire State Building in 1945.[/li][/ul]
That said, I suspect that the equation might change, now. If insurers stop covering terrorism, the tallest buildings will have extra risk. And people’s natural fears will probably cause the price of rent in those buildings to drop, reducing the economic incentive to build more of them.
This is not necessarily good logic. Many people do not protect themselves from the sun but are afraid to fly. Yet many more people die of skin cancer than in airplane crashes. Study after study (reported by Time magizine, Nova, etc.) has shown that humans are more afraid of spectacular death than mundane death regardless of the odds.
Again I say, It’s not a great idea but the fact remains if there had been parachutes available more people would have survived the tragic incident at the WTC.
You just don’t understand what it takes to do that… I’ve seen people that know very well what they are doing take 10 minutes standing on the edge of a cliff. People will not in any case just run and jump…
Well, if parachutes wouldn’t work (however I find that risk a little more acceptable than just jumping), what about a slide of some sort in a tunnel, similar to what they use on airplanes? The idea would have to be refined of course. Anything is better than burning to death.
If you’re saying that the towers collapsed faster than something in free-fall would fall, then you’re saying that something other than gravity was either pulling or pushing the top of the tower down. What force would that have been?
I can think of two reasons why the towers would have fallen more slowly than an object in free-fall:
Vacuum in the wake of a large object. The tops of the towers weren’t designed to be drag-reducing as they came down. A big, flat object (the roof) would create a significant “sucking” force behind it.
The floors collapsed from the top down, so it took some amount of time for the weight of the floors above to crush the floors below. Since we’re talking about bending or breaking steel, concrete, drywall, filing cabinets, etc., this time should be longer than the time for a similar volume of air to be compressed or move around an object of similar size in free-fall.
The cop in question is said to have survived his “ride” with two broken legs. What’s amazing about this story, if true, is not that he survived a fall from 800+ feet (given my two points above), but that he did not get crushed by 38 floors’ worth of concrete when he landed. Even more amazing was that he got out of The Pile in under 72 hours with two broken legs (I first heard the story on Thursday).
The more I think about those points, the more I think the story is false, but not because of the speed of the falling tower.
Of course I’m not saying that the tower fell faster than gravity. I’m just saying that even if it took 30 seconds for it to fall, then the average velocity was about 50 mph, which isn’t normally survivable anyway. And I think it came down faster than that.
Anyway, from the descriptions I’ve been hearing of the destruction site, it’s hard to imagine that this guy could have survived. He would have not only have had to survive an 800 ft drop, but there would be the equivalent of a 20 stiry building on top of him.
Have they even dug that far down into the wreckage yet? How did he get out?
I would also have to be very skeptical. Conspicuous by their absence so far are any of the “miraculous survival!” stories that you usually hear during this sort of clean-up, such as after Mexican earthquakes. The “newborn infant found alive in the rubble!”, that sort of thing. As soon as they’re found, they’re all over the media.
But the only “miraculous survival!” story I’ve heard all week was the one about 5 firefighters in an SUV, and my understanding is that that was shortly thereafter proved false, and withdrawn.
So where is this guy, if he even exists? There ought to have been an interview from a hospital room by now, if all he had was two broken legs. I did a Search on cnn.com just now under “elevator” and there’s nothing there, also on ABC. I’ve got the Sunday Chicago Tribune here in front of me, and it’s nothing but bad news.
And I’m no engineer, but even I know that as the building began to buckle, the elevator shafts wouldn’t have remained vertical and smooth enough for the elevator car to have continued on down.
Is it possible that the Authorities (“They”) are deliberately suppressing stories of miraculous survivals, so as not to give false hope to the other 4,999 other families still waiting for news?
real estate is expensive because sky scrapers were built, not the other way around.
If instead of two 110 story buildings with base x there had been one 50 story building with base 4x, it might not have fallen, there would be four times the floor space on every floor, and four times the rent to be collected.
People die in high rise fires every year. There’s no way to get fire fighting equipment up there, people get trapped in upper stories, escapes are inadequate. It’s horrible to see people beating at unbreakable glass to get relief from smoke and fire, horribler to see them plummet in the vain hope of survival when they somehow manage to break the glass.
I reject the notion that we’re required to do what we can. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high sky scraper. There’s no mystery to the engineering. But it’d take two hours to get to work. In the event of the failure of the elevators, it’d take five or six hours minimum to descend the stairs to the ground floor. Unless you include housing in the tower for all the workers, it’s idiocy. And who would want to live like that? Furthermore, too much of anything is too much. Dancing is beautiful; dance marathons are torture. A seven-foot-tall man can be a great athlete; and eight-foot-tall man can barely walk.
I hope they don’t rebuild twin towers on that location unless they’re of some sane height. But I say that in full knowledge that they’ll probably try to outdo the towers in Indonesia.
I don’t mean a few luxury condos in a high rise wouldn’t be pleasant. Living in apartments normal office workers could afford surrounded day and night by your fellow office workers, unable to leave the building without making a two-hour commitment to elevators would be unpleasant. It’s not quite prison, but it’s pretty close.
My case is for wider, squatter buildings of less consistent engineering–big open areas, elevator shafts and fire walls at random locations, water parks and natatoria on various levels to provide sprinkler water in a fire. There are ways to provide the advantages of high rises without incurring the disadvantages. Height for its own sake is a disaster waiting to happen.
Actually not a bad idea at all. Basically like lifeboats on a ship? They could be located at the top of the building. And in the case of buildings like the WTC they could be aimed (with jet assist like an ejection seat for the entire unit) at water or large park or whatever). Not bad at all.
Having skydived (although never having base jumped), I can see many problems with issuing parachutes. Parachutes do take some skill to operate for one, but the thing that sticks in my mind is that chutes are not like fire hoses, you can’t just lock them up for 10 years and assume they are going to work when you need them. Granted most would probably work, but still…
Using a parachute? I could see a mass thing for multiple people as a better idea, but where would you store them and how would you launch from the middle of the building?
I was insinuating using a round. Rounds require almost no skill to operate except in the landing as they just go straight down. The ones you’ve used are squares and require a lot more skill to operate.
If you were really going to do this, it would not make sense to just issue parachutes and expect people to jump out the window when the time came. Possibly a static-line setup, with 4 egress’s per-floor (one each side of the building), with the egresses staggered from floor-to-floor to reduce the chances of landing on someone below you. Sure people would get hurt/killed doing this and it would be messy, but its better than the alternative.
Two things that I don’t think were brought up yet(maybe I missed it)
were
The people died anyway. What is the difference then? I think mass parachute evacuation is not workable but it is a chance however slim. Waiting to be pancake crushed is no option at all.
The people that I have seen that jumped looked like they were falling backwards. In otherwords it looked like they were being blown out of the building by the forces.
But to put a twist on this thread, I work in a 25 story building and when we were getting new offices on the 16th floor it caught on fire (a real little one but you could see smoke coming out of the building) it was CHAOS. No one knew what to do. So I can understand the panic. If a little fire can cause that what would that cause.
The twist is here. I went out afterwords and bought kind of a reinforced rope ladder that stretches 5 stories. I figure it was a chance seeing how chaotic it was. Of course now that we are on the 16th floor there isn’t much we can do.
So do you think people will buy parachutes on their own?
In freefall for the first 4-6 seconds you don’t have much control. Unless you launch with no rotation it is easy to go on you back or headdown in that time frame. After that people that don’t know how to fly look like a fish on dry land. On their back or tumbling. Someone who does know what they are doing can stand still in whatever body position of their choosing and fly around. I imagine these people went off and rolled on there back and of course stayed that way once air speed built up.
Well, there are many interesting ideas on this thread, and maybe the idea of a parachute sounds unusual, at that.
But, I cannot help thinking of those people who were stranded with no hope of living whatsoever, for whom a parachute would have been an option they would have grabbed with both hands.
The issues surrounding the use of parachutes are fraught with danger: lack of experience in their use, round or square, where do you place them, how to break a window, where do you jump from, you might die on the way down, and so it goes.
Any straw poll of those who died trapped and helpless would come out in favour of some system of escape, we can be sure about that, so maybe the idea of a parachute is not so bad after all.
Maybe they could have some kind of dock that deploys out of the side of the building and drops several weighted cables. Then each person would be issued gloves and some kind of traction belt that they can latch on to the cable. The belt could be made so that is slows the people down to a safe speed even if they panic and don’t know what they are doing.
Probably just as hard to execute as parachutes, but maybe safer.
As an aside, I read an eyewitness account from a journalist on the scene who described watching people jump from the building. One guy in particular, according to this reporter, did appear to have a makeshift parachute he was trying to use when he jumped; he said it slowed him down for about ten floors, then came apart.
I’m trying to find the cite for where I read that - if I can come across it again I’ll post it.