Posted on 10/24/2001 8:35:42 AM PDT by dead
"Perhaps their only recourse might have been to get to the roof, but it might not have been likely that they would make it, either.
"Up until now, we've never really had more than one floor burning in a fully-occupied high-rise building.
"Did we ever plan for something of this magnitude? No."
Gosh, do I ever smell a class action lawsuit brewing!
What a bunch of lame-ass excuses. "We've never had more than one floor burning". Well, golly gee! You didn't look very far at what's happened in other cities like Philadelphia or Los Angeles, with multi-story infernos.
Another howler: "Perhaps their only recourse might have been to get to the roof, but it might not have been likely that they would make it, either."
Well, I'll take "not very likely to survive" over "certainly dead" any day!
You have to wonder what these folks were thinking. Assume, for a moment, the fire had been controlled or burnt itself out, and the towers not collapsed. At least six floors of the North Tower had been demolished by the plane's impact, including all the emergency staircases (why the folks up there couldn't get out). How were they proposing to get people down? They certainly couldn't have them all come out into the middle of the unsupported floors liable to collapse. Obviously, the only way out was "up" for those above the fire.
This lame-brains comments, and the WSJ article only reinforce my conviction about a total lack of planning among NYC Emergency Services for what might happen in any high rise in the city with a big fire.
NYC Code requires all buildings to have unlocked doors to allow emergency egress to the roof. There is no undue rash of suicides off of any of NYC's many towers.
The PA was more concerned about the telecom atennae being damaged.
However, if this was a real concern, each floor's fire marshall (NYC Code requires each floor have a designated fire marshall), could have been given the ability to unlock the door.
Aren't those rules formulated for our "safety" and our "protection?" If so, then why exempt yourself from having to follow them as well? Live by the self-exemption, die by the self-exemption ... except that it killed a lot of innocents as well.
The very week prior to 9/11, Les Robertson, the Professional Structural Engineer in responsible charge of the design of the WTC Towers said to an anti-terrorism conference regarding his building design "I designed it to withstand a 707 flying into it."
Maybe you didn't consider it, but I'm sure the designers and insurers did. Planes flying over NYC have hit other buildings and even each other before. Obviously this is something to be prepared for, even if only as an accidental incident.
Finally, Ramzi Youssef, mastermind of WTC attack #1 in 1993 was caught with plans to comandeer a plane and fly it into the CIA HQ in Langley. Tom Clancy had written about a fictitious terrorist plot to fly a plane into the Capitol. The use of planes as weapons is as old as the Kamimaze attacks.
That was Tower 2, which actually had a helipad. Tower 1 had no helipad. In 1993 the Police cleared a makeshift space by knocking down the telecom attenae on part of the roof and then taking people off the building. It could have been done again, but the doors were locked, and the NYPD Helicopter crew had no way of getting in.
Are we talking about the same buildings? You could go up on the roof deck of 2 WTC, jump over the low railings of the walkway fence, and run about 15 yards to the edge of the building if you wanted to jump. NOBODY EVER DID IT. THE EXCUSE IS A BUNCH OF CRAP.
All NYC Skyscrapers have unlocked roof doors. How many people jump off in a year? ZERO!
were there and one little helicopter....i see huge panic being filmed and it would not have been pleasent to watch the rescue fail.
Of course, it was so much more pleasant to watch them all die in the collapse? I really doubt there would have been a panic. People would've been thrilled to be getting off of there.
Perhaps they thought that the security guard or the public address announcer actually knew something more about the situation than they did. (Big mistake, in retrospect!)
I told this story in another thread -- a co-worker's wife worked at the WTC. One of her co-workers got out of the building, then went back into the building (never to return, unfortunately) to get a few things from her office! Her fiance, who also worked at the company, is kicking himself from not stopping her from going into the building. It just hit me now, in retyping this story, that it is surprising that they let people go back into the building.
Seeing that a military bomber once crashed into the Empire State Building, just down the street, I don't see why this was so unimaginable.
The architect of the WTC used to boast that he designed the towers to take the impact of a 707. I've read that the containment domes over nuclear power reactors are designed to take the impact of a 747. It's a common enough disaster scenario.
If you couldn't imagine it, then maybe it's a good thing we don't hire you to develop building emergency evacuation procedures. The sad thing, of course, is that the people we did hire for the WTC proved to be equally unimaginative.
I don't think they should be punished, but at the same time, their performance evaluation would not lead me to hire them over other qualified candidates if a similar position were to be offered at another building site.
If that sounds 'cruel' -- well, it would be even more 'cruel' to the more competent person who was in competition for the same job. And it would be even more cruel to the ten thousand people working in that building, whose lives would then be at greater risk due to our 'compassionate' hiring practices.
'Failing to reward incompetency' is not a bad thing. It's the basis for the free market system, and it saves lives.
I guess I'm always looking around the corners...
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