For some reason, I noticed something at the end I hadn’t noticed before. How did the folk in the Promenade Room who survived get back down? The entire disaster takes place in darkness, so the closing scenes at street level are clearly meant to be “later that night”.
Both of the stairwells are blocked by explosions. We know that late on, Steve McQueen relies on a single freight elevator which has been rigged to run off a backup generator to get up to the 65th floor. So how do the folk on the trashed 135th floor get to street level?
I know it would make for a very boring final act to watch people traipse down flights of stairs, but perhaps a throwaway line to explain how they got down would have been useful.
It’s been some time that I saw TTI. As I recall they set off a explosion that ruptured the water storage tank at/near the top, that water put out the fire. I’d say that is unlikely, but hey that’s the story.
I would assume that floor by floor the fire department would make a pathway breaching floors and installing ladders if needed, or once they got there set up a rope harness to lower people. It may be a long process but the people would get out before running out of supplies. Heli-rescue may be possible.
Parts of both stairwells are blocked, but that doesn’t make the whole stairway unusable. Once the fire was out, I figure they found a route that was passable; down the north stairwell to the 95th floor, cross over to the south stairwell, take that down to 60, something like that. They had the architect with them; no better person to help find your way.
It’s amazing how many of these disaster movies have someone with the right knowledge there to help. E.g., the kid who knew about the thin steel at one place on the hull on the Poseidon.
Yes, they put the fire out by blowing up the water tanks at the top of the building.
Yes, I guess they would have managed to piece together some kind of safe route down. It just seems unlikely it was the same night. As I said, I think at least a throwaway line like having one character say “well, that took a hell of a long time to get down, but it’s great to be back on the ground”, or even have the closing scenes in dawn light, would have been enough.