Rescue worker evacuation policies? (Somewhat WTC related)

Factual Questions
1

This week’s issue of one of the two major news magazines (can’t remember if it’s Time or Newsweek; I think the latter) had the last shots of a photographer who was crushed in the collapse of Tower 2, I believe, the only photojournalist to die there. Pretty eerie stuff; in fact, his last one was taken just seconds before he died.

Anyway, his shots included rescue workers, and wondering which of his subjects were alive or dead brought up a question in my mind. A lot of firefighters and such died in the collapses. What are standard policies for pulling firefighters out of a structure in danger of collapsing? Granted, a skyscraper’s never fallen from this sort of thing, but one would expect that the senior officers on the scene must’ve realized that there had to be some pretty major structural damage, damage getting worse due to the fires.

Whose decision is it to tell the men to get out, despite the chance that victims are still unrescued? How do they decide to do so? Were the trucks and stuff stationed a good distance away in this particular case, or did many get caught in the collapses?

Please note that I’m not blaming any decision-makers at the site for the deaths. I just wonder WHOSE decision it was in the first place.

2

My understanding is that first, nobody expected the towers to collapse in the first place. So there wouldn’t have been any decision-making as to whether or not to send firefighters into the buildings. Nobody was standing there thinking, “Hmm, I wonder if these really huge buildings are going to collapse.”

A building’s on fire, firefighters go in and find people. That’s how it works. When it’s a regular building, like a home or a Dunkin Donuts or a warehouse, the fire chief, the fire marshal, those guys in charge who ride in the red Suburban that follows the fire trucks, have a pretty good idea of how long you can let it burn before the roof is going to collapse, so they know when to start pulling their people out. But a couple of 110-story skyscrapers, whose own architect had just said, a month earlier, that they were built to resist an impact by a 747? It simply never occurred to anybody in charge that they might collapse.

No, one would not expect them to realize that.

**
I saw at least one photo on CNN.com of a completely crushed, burned, and ash-covered fire truck being hauled away to the landfill.

Second, that when the buildings did go, they went really fast, boom, like that, so there wasn’t any time to pull any firefighters out.

The first plane hit just before 9 a.m., the second plane hit just after 9 a.m. So both towers were standing there, burning.

Then the first tower went down at about 10 a.m., the second one less than half an hour later. There wasn’t time to make decisions about pulling firefighters out. Nobody made a decision to let them stay in there, to not pull them out. The situation was just chaos. It was obviously a concerted attack, but people had no way of knowing whether it was an official “war” or just terrorists. Everybody was wondering, “Are there missiles incoming, too?”

So all the firefighters and cops just carried on, doing what they had been trained to do, and then shit happened.

http://www.wnbc.com/wtc/timeline.html

3

Even if they did pull out of the buildings (and some did), most all of the rescue vehicles were parked in the streets around the towers–the same streets that the towers fell into. The first rescuers to go in after the collapse were reportedly walking on top of buried fire trucks.