I hate to add another WTC thread, but I got to thinking about something tonight while watching a Fox News piece tonight. Suppose you were trapped in a tall building near the top floors and it had suffered severe structural damage on the floors below you. Assuming you knew that it was going to collapse, would you be safer in trying to make your way down to the ground floor, or would you be better off trying to reach the roof where you could “ride” the building down as it imploded?
In the building or on the roof, I doubt you would survive in either case.
The proper response, then, is to make your way down with the intention of getting out before the building collapses. You have no way of knowing when the building will actually collapse, so you may well have enough time to get out.
Yep. You can’t ‘ride’ the building down. By all accounts, the WTC was on the ground in about 10 seconds, which means the average speed of collapse was over 100 miles per hour. So even if you survived all the way down and didn’t get crushed in the meat-grinder of concrete and steel, you’d still hit the ground going 100mph, which is almost always fatal.
But it seems clear that it really was more like blender being inside or even on top of that building. Imagine - you are on the roof, and it collapses. When it hits the floor below, there is a tremendous explosion, with metal and concrete and glass and furniture and people flying everywhere. Then that floor collapses almost instantly, and you drop again. Another explosion, more deadly flying debris, and another crash… Everything just mixed together and was pulverized into near dust.
Look at the rescue scene - you don’t even see whole desks and filing cabinets, and there must have been tens of thousands of them in there. It looks like the extreme violence of the event just pulverized anything. The rescuers have also said they are not even finding intact bodies, just small pieces.
Over 6000 people died in there. Most of them were in the top half of the towers, and their bodies should have been near the top of the pile. Yet the rescuers have only recovered 200-300 bodies, and most of those were people killed on the ground by debris. Victims that died inside or on top of the towers are pretty much gone.
You’re probably right, but then there’s the story of the guy who was one the 82nd floor when the building went down and he managed to survive. But now that you mention the whirling blender effect, and the speed (didn’t think about in MPH), it looks like that unless you’re lucky enough to get down the stairs and out, there’s not much hope for you.
I don’t believe that story about the guy who rode the building down. It would be the miracle story of the century, and he’d be all over the news. It was probably another one of the many hoaxes that came out of that.
Remember, by the time the building collapsed on the 82nd floor, the mass landing on that floor would have been the equivalent of a 20 story highrise! And if you survive that, you get to be mixed together with hundreds of thousands of pounds of jagged steel and concrete, and then dropped eighty more stories. I’d have a much easier time believing that someone jumped from the 82nd floor and lived by landing on the roof of a bus or something.
Snopes is still on the fence on this one; appearently there is some evidence for a police Port Authority officer who rode the building down, but it has not yet been confirmed or debunked.
What about the news stories of people trapped in the debris calling out using their cellphones; are these stories apocryphal? and if not, whereabouts in the building were they before it collapsed?
From what I understand, there were lots of tunnels and basements beneath the WTC complex, including a subway station. Most of these underground spaces apparently collapsed and caved in. However, I would not be surprised if some people in these basement areas managed to survive the initial building collapse, by being protected by a beam or something equivalent that managed to hold up. These people would not have been subjected to the multi-story fall. Unfortunately, they would be trapped, and probably severely injured. Long-term prospects for these people would not be good.
>>What about the news stories of people trapped in the debris calling out using their cellphones; are these stories apocryphal? and if not, whereabouts in the building were they before it collapsed?
There was a woman who claimed to have spoken with her husband, a police officer, who said he was trapped with 9 other men. They interviewed several firefighters who were elated at the news and said they had stopped all other efforts to concentrate on the “rescue” of those survivors. This was later determined to be a hoax (not sure how long it took) and if you ask me, that fcking btch should be killed immediatley.
I did see a fireman who talked about rescuing someone, who claimed to be a building manager, on the ground whose last memory was being on the 40-something floor. At first I thought it may be an actual case of someone riding down. Weird things do happen. But he likely got conked good from the debris and simply could not remember making it down the building just before the collapse.
I think the best way to survive a building collapse is to not be in one. If you are in one, the best advice is to get lucky and get out.
I think the cell phone reports turned out to be a hoax.
I saw an interview with one of the firefighters, and he said that temperatures were too high even deep inside the rubble for it to be likely that anyone survived. Afer all, the pile is still smoking. The jet fuel was not all burned away before the building collapsed, and fire flareups were still occuring a day or two after the collapse. I imaging all that superheated steel just cooked everything that might have been in there.
The way I heard it was that friends and loved ones were calling the cell phones, in the hopes that the ringing would attract rescuers. This was mentioned on both ABC and CNN late in the week of the 11th. For this report to be true, one has to postulate both the survival of the phone and reasonable proximity to a transmitting node. Considering how many thousands of cell phones were likely in the buildings at the time, I think it’s at least possible.
Except I seem to recall that the cellular tower in that area was on top of the WTC. When the building collapsed, everyone in the area reported that their cell phones stopped working.