I was reading a bunch on the World Trade Center and I found the people in Tower 1 (the first tower) that were above the impact zone were cut off because the jet had collapsed all the stairwells. The sites I’ve read said no one above the impact floors in Tower 1 made it out alive.
Now it said because the second jet hit Tower 2 at an angle one stairwell was left intact and people were able to climb down and be saved.
My question is this, supposing the Towers didn’t collapse. I’ve watched a lot of people in newstapes from helicopters and such above the impact and you can see them drinking and waving at the helicopters.
So the question is IF the towers didn’t collapse, would the firefighters eventually been able to somehow get to those people? Or was the fire so great that it would’ve taken weeks to put out, even if the building stood standing?
It seems like the biggest number of dead came from the fact no one expected either Tower to collapse and it took them off guard and the people died as a result of the collapse. In fact I remember commenting to one co-worker after seeing the secong tower collapse how strange the skyline of NYC would look from now on with only one tower. Even after seeing one tower collaspe I didn’t assume the other would
I know it’s a hypothetical question and I wasn’t sure where to post this so feel free to move it if this is the wrong forum.
Well fires in major skyscrapers are a big deal, and if allowed to burn for long periods of time the buildings will eventually fail. I have never dug into it much but I was under the impression that the towers collapsed because of the fires. The fires eventually heat the structural steel to the point that it begins to lose structural integrity. Once the structural steel is weakened beyond the load of the current structure, stuff is gonna come down. This occurrs in a matter of hours (like 10-12 IIRC) these buildings cannot just burn indefinitely and stay up.
A good example of this would be the fire at One Meridian Plaza in 1991. The owner and the insurer got into a complicated legal battle over whether (and how much) of the structural steel that had been exposed to the fire could safely be reused, and the building was eventually torn down after a settlement was reached.
I guess helicopters would have eventually gotten them all.
It’s worth noting that the towers were doomed the moment they were struck. It is, as far as I have ever been able to tell, inconceivable from an engineering standpoint for them to have survived.
This slideshow provides a good explanation for those who have never looked into it.
I always say when this comes up with regard to roof rescue by Helicopter there were people IRL in the South Tower who died on 9-11 - even though they were in the only unobstructed top to bottom Stairway in the South Tower (STAIRWAY A) - because they went up instead of down looking for/expecting a Helicopter roof rescue.
It is in the 9-11 Report. But here it is in USA Today a more easily found cite. Link has a few other relevant tidbits too.
link One stairway in the south tower remained open above the crash, but few used it to escape. Stairway A, one of three, was unobstructed from top to bottom. The jet crashed into the 78th through 84th floors of the south tower. A few people escaped from the 78th floor down these stairs. One person went down the stairs from the 81st floor, two from the 84th floor and one from the 91st. Others went up these stairs in search of a helicopter rescue that wasn’t possible because of heavy smoke on the rooftop.